Playing with Fire, a collaboration between Edmund de Waal, CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark, and Kunstsilo in Norway, is now open at the Kunstsilo before its final stop at The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in 2025. The exhibition brings together a significant number of Salto’s works alongside a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence. On this, de Waal notes:

‘Axel Salto is one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. He created a unique body of ceramic work that continues to fascinate me. His sculptures seem to be on the point of change: glazes are caught in flux. Vases swell as if to burst. He cared about the ways that patterns change course, shift energies, how an animal becomes a person, a man metamorphoses into a stag. Ovid ran powerfully through his life. That moment of change, transformation, is the moment when poetry occurs.’

Kunstsilo

Works by Anthony Caro and Edmund de Waal are included in the group show Moments are Monuments at BY ART MATTERS. Exploring the evolution of everyday objects into works of art, the exhibition considers the small but important moments of human life.

BY ART MATTERS

Work by Edmund de Waal is included in the group exhibition All About the Vessel. Part of the European Capitals of Culture programme, All About The Vessel explores the development of ceramic art from early modernism to the present.

Kunstquartier Gmunden

Edmund de Waal’s 2021 piece September Song, II, is on display in The Shape of Things, a group exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Considering how artists draw from art history to express the complexities of the human condition, the exhibition questions the notion that still life is a lesser genre, showing how important it is to artists and society.

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Congratulations to Edmund de Waal on being awarded the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by France.

Work by Edmund de Waal will be on view in the exhibition Fragments of Memory. The Treasure of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague at Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau. Centring on the topic of belief and memories, the cathedral’s trove of religious relics will be juxtaposed with photographs by Josef Koudelka, ceramics by Edmund de Waal, and the film In the Land of Drought by Julian Rosefeldt.

Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau

We congratulate Edmund de Waal on being awarded the Isamu Noguchi Award for 2023. Established in 2014 and presented annually, the award celebrates Noguchi’s legacy by acknowledging artistic excellence in highly accomplished individuals who share his spirit of innovation, imagination and commitment to creativity. 

Marking its landmark tenth year, the Noguchi Museum will host the presentation of the award on Tuesday, 12 September 2023, in recognition of artist and writer Edmund de Waal, artist Theaster Gates, and novelist and editor Hanya Yanagihara.

Isamu Noguchi

Edmund de Waal's newest book, Letters to Camondo, has been published in France, UK and USA.

Count Moïse de Camondo lived a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears, the Ephrussi, first encountered in his bestselling memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like the Ephrussi, the Camondos were part of belle époque high society. They were also targets of anti-semitism.

Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art for his son to inherit. But when Nissim was killed in the First World War, it became a memorial and, on the Count's death, was bequeathed to France.

The Musée Nissim de Camondo has remained unchanged since 1936. Edmund de Waal has explored the lavish rooms, exquisite objects and detailed archives. In a haunting series of letters, he writes to the Count, and gets to know the boy who journeyed from Constantinople and became a model French citizen, before all that was gained was torn away.

Order a copy here.

The British Museum has published a catalogue on Edmund de Waal's work, centring around his "library of exile", currently shown at the museum.

"This beautifully produced book reflects upon the themes raised by de Waal’s thought-provoking work of art. A preface by Booker Prize-nominated author Elif Shakef considers the importance of literature and its capacity to transcend language and borders. The introduction from British Museum Director, Hartwig Fischer, positions the artwork within the wider context of the Museum’s collection, highlighting the dialogue between objects through time, from ancient history to the contemporary. Finally, de Waal concentrates on the work itself, its journey to the British Museum via Venice and Dresden, and its future role in the foundation of the new University of Mosul Library. 'Library of exile' is a contemplative read which celebrates language and the opportunity for dialogues with the displaced."

British Museum