Mirek Smisek: 60 Years, 60 Pots
- ISBN-10
- 0473151936
- ISBN-13
- 9780473151935
- Category
- Potters
- Pages
- 76
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2009
- Authors
- Mirek Smisek, Janet Bayly, Justine Olsen
Description
Mahara Gallery, Kapiti Coast's District Gallery, presents the first-ever survey exhibition of leading Czech / New Zealand potter Mirek Smisek (b1925). Curator Gary Freemantle has selected 60 key works spanning his 60 years' of production from private and public collections around New Zealand. These represent Smisek's basic forms of vases, bowls, crocks, jugs and unomi (Japanese tea-bowls). Smisek presents not only a stunning model of a lengthy and award-studded career as a potter, but of a creative life well-lived. He was one of numerous European émigrés to New Zealand who escaped the German occupation of his homeland, interrogation by the Gestapo, and months in forced labour camps and factories. Smisek formed a strong personal philosophy of the lifeaffirming value of creativity and the arts as a result. Smisek started working with clay in Canberra and Sydney in the late 1940s, assisted English potter Ernie Shufflebottom briefly at Crown Lynn in Auckland, then established himself as Nelson's first working potter in the 1950s. He worked and studied with ceramic masters Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada at St Ives and in Japan in the 1960s and 70s. After import restrictions were lifted in the early 1980's many NZ potters suffered from the deluge of cheap pottery that flooded the market. Some were made redundant and others tried to redefine their work in more sculptural terms. Smisek has continued to survive and work resolutely as a potter, producing ceramic ware that people can use in a functional way but also appreciate as an object that fuses function and aesthetics. Over the past 35 years he has established 3 studio potteries on the Kapiti Coast - at Manakau, Te Horo and latterly Waikanae, where he continues to produce new work. Mirek Smisek: 60 Years/60 Pots reprodes every work in the show, with biographical and critical essays by Janet Bayly and Justine Olsen.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Strangers Arrive: Emigrés and the Arts in New Zealand, 1930–1980
By Leonard BellExhibition catalogues Barr, Jim, and Mary Barr, Rudolf Gopas: A retrospective exhibition (New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Gallery, 1982). Barton, Christina, The Expatriates (Wellington: Adam Gallery, 2001).
-
Marti Friedlander: Portraits of the Artists
By Leonard BellFriedlander, Marti, Jim Barr and Mary Barr, Contemporary New Zealand Painters A–M, Martinborough: Alister Taylor, 1980. Friedlander, Marti, 'Portraits', in B. R. Williams, Roy Parsons and Lindsay Missen (eds), The Summer Book 2: A New ...
-
Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand
By Nick Bollinger... Mirek Smisek was showing for the rst time that a New Zealander could be a full-time, independent ceramicist. Dutch-born Eelco Boswijk in Nelson and German Odo Strewe in Auckland had recently opened cafés, Chez Eelco and Babel ...
-
A History of New Zealand in 100 Objects
By Jock PhillipsEvents such as the Napier earthquake and its aftermath, or the feats of aviators — the tragic and unsuccessful attempt ... was a battle between the 'high-brows' preferring the classics and the 'lowbrows' wanting popular American music.
-
Artists and Craftsmen in New Zealand: Text and Monochrome Photographs
By Peter Cape, Steve RumseyArtists and Craftsmen in New Zealand: Text and Monochrome Photographs
-
All Honourable Men: Inside the Muldoon Cabinet, 1975-1984
By Hugh TempletonInside the Muldoon Cabinet, 1975-1984 Hugh Templeton. stratosphere . That way , even for Muldoon , lay perdition and even he knew it . His riposte , and one of his strangest ... Now the wizard would show the world a new trick .
-
Crown Lynn: A New Zealand Icon
By Valerie Ringer Monk"In the late 1930s Tom Clark, barely in his early 20s, began making porcelain tiles and electrical fittings alongside his family's brick and pipe works in New Lynn. By 1970...
-
Ten Thousand Years of Pottery
By Emmanuel CooperThe finest history of pottery available, this book offers an inspirational journey through one of the oldest and most widespread of human activities.
-
First Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking
By David Veart"'First catch your Weka', the explorer Charles Heaphy advised in 1842, then stuff it with sage and onion and roast it on a stick. In that simple way began a...
-
New Ceramics
By Emmanuel Cooper, Eileen LewensteinNew Ceramics