Carmen D'Apollonio is a Swiss artist, born in 1973 in Zurich.
Before beginning her self-taught career in the ceramics discipline, D'Apollonio worked
as an art director for short films and commercials in the mid-nineties. In 1996, she
started as an assistant for the artist Urs Fischer in Berlin and New York. At this
position she learned building sculptures with different materials which led the way for
her own practice that she began in 2014.
D'Apollonio's process begins with sketching, which she then translates into clay and
bronze - evolving the three-dimensional form as she goes. Humorous and playful
sculptures are then created that turn the exhibition space into a surrealist landscape.
These works - mostly lamps and vessels - have grown in size gradually since she
started working nine years ago and are undoubtedly creature-like. They invite the
audience and one another to interact within the exhibition space by offering
suggestive narrative fragments and titles charged with different emotions, ranging
from the comic to the melancholic.
In this context D'Apollonio describes her work as "simple; it often gives way to humor.
As if clay had its way of being, its own personality." The pieces also fuse
craftsmanship with functionality, while highlighting the artist's tongue-in-cheek
sensibility and her recent experiments with gesture and materiality. Making these
ceramics is like an alchemical transformation that combines control as well as
unpredictability. This tension is part of her artistic process that continues to push the
boundaries between utilitarian object and work of art.
Her visual references and influences include various artists, such as Pablo Picasso,
Jean Arp and Diego Giacometti, but also nature, architectural spaces and the body.
D'Apollonio lives and works in Los Angeles.