Berry Campbell is pleased to present a focused exhibition of porcelain sculptures by Sally Silberberg, an extraordinary and largely unseen body of work that marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice. The exhibition is curated by Glenn Adamson, an independent curator, writer, and historian, and previously Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition is accompanied by a 72-page catalogue.
Created during the 1980s, a concentrated period of experimentation for Silberberg, these sculptures are a decisive shift away from functional ceramics and toward a radical new sculptural language. After years of working on the potter’s wheel, Silberberg developed a new method built from solid blocks of porcelain. Layered with pigment, cut, torn, and carved, each work introduces both risk and unpredictability and pushes porcelain to its structural and perceptual limits.
These works challenge perception, and Silberberg asks whether porcelain, “an elegant material hovering between rough clay and glass” as the artist put it, could instead be experienced as dense and geological. The resulting sculptures are angular, striated, and weighty, their layered surfaces and sharp angles evoking fractured stone or exposed strata. Both controlled and unstable, the sculptures balance precision with disruption, and give the impression of forms under pressure caught in a state of continual transformation.
While firmly rooted in ceramic tradition, these works also engage with broader currents in postwar and 1980s art. Disorienting spatial collisions reference Cubism, exposed stratigraphy can be read in relation to the work of Naum Gabo, and the works’ activated grids and stripes relate to patterns of 1980s design and architecture. The exhibition’s curator, Glenn Adamson, calls her more of “a deconstructivist than a constructivist” and relates her orchestration of chance and control to that of Gerhard Richter.
Works from this series are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian. Silberberg’s porcelain sculptures constitute a distinct and powerful body of work that expands the possibilities of porcelain and marks a pivotal moment in sculptural achievement.
