Klara Kristalova’s Ceramic Sculptures Tackle Climate Anxiety with Dark Humor
Klara Kristalova, installation view of “The Cold Wind and the Warm” at Lehmann Maupin London, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
“Everything suddenly started to feel like a threat,” said Klara Kristalova, of the themes that informed her current solo exhibition, “The Cold Wind and the Warm,” at Lehmann Maupin in London. Consumed by the never-ending news cycle and mounting evidence of the impact of global warming, the artist spent the last year ricocheting between feelings of deep dread and weary optimism.
Her first solo show with Lehmann Maupin since 2015, “The Cold Wind and the Warm” follows the artist’s inclusion last year in “Strange Clay,” the Hayward Gallery’s critically-acclaimed exhibition, and her recent solo presentations with Perrotin in both New York (2022) and Seoul (2021).
Portrait of Klara Kristalova by Magnus Karlsson, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
However, what sets this exhibition apart is its powerful focus on the urgent issue of climate change, born from Kristalova’s growing sense of “panic,” as she put it. In “The Cold Wind and the Warm,” the artist creates a space to discuss the most monumental of topics through small details and a dark, gentle humor. The exhibition, including ceramic sculptures and works on paper, pulls the viewer into a bizarre and fantastical world where minute details and uncanny characters channel the experience of facing immense and irreversible change.
The result is an immensely powerful exhibition where the theme of change is a vehicle to call for urgent and widespread action in response to impending ecological disaster. The artist’s state of continuous emotional flux and a self-inflicted pressure to communicate the reality of ecological decline have imbued her new body of work with a unique intensity. “It’s not obvious when you look at them, but the works come from a heaviness that I needed to express,” Kristalova said.
Klara Kristalova, Shield, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
Working from a secluded studio in Norrtälje, Sweden—one of the northernmost points of the Stockholm archipelago—the artist spends much of her time immersed in nature. The towering trees, rippling lake, and brimming bushes that surround her bright, barnlike studio are embedded in her psyche. As a result, she is acutely attuned to the effects of climate change on her local landscape: “I never thought that, in my lifetime, I would see the changes in the weather. Where I live, we no longer have ice in the winter and the summers have gotten so hot. Flowers that used to grow can no longer thrive in the dry soil. You can see and feel the change in the air.”
Inherently ambiguous and unfixed, the works on show in “The Cold Wind and the Warm” mirror the capacity for continuous change that is intrinsic to the environment Kristalova describes. Like the flora and fauna that surround the artist’s studio, the sculptures themselves seem to transform and morph before the eyes of the viewer. Each work is stuck in a state of metamorphosis, constantly shifting between categories of human, animal, and plant.
Klara Kristalova, Lust for Life, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
This notion is most aptly exemplified by Weight (2023), a small ceramic of a nude woman with a larger-than-life butterfly emerging from her back. With its short life cycle punctuated by a sequence of physical transformations, the butterfly is a potent symbol of transfiguration that draws the viewers’ attention to the temporality of nature. This work blurs the boundaries between human and animal, and invites viewers into a world of symbiosis and hybridity. In the case of another ceramic, entitled Lust for Life (2023), a felled tree is personified as a stranded woman reaching upwards in despair. This corpse-like log reminds the viewer of the death inherent in the chopping down of a tree.
Describing Girl with sun mask (2023), one of the most eye-catching pieces on show, Kristalova explained the dichotomies at the heart of her work. “I love sunny weather, the warmth, and light. It lifts you up, but it’s also so powerful—think of the intensity of the light and the dryness it can create if the rain doesn’t come. A cruel lack of balance. I think I wanted the sun mask to encompass both beauty and a bit of cruelty,” she said.
Indeed, capturing opposing ideas within one form is central to the artist’s practice: It allows her to construct a world poised somewhere between reality and imagination, where birth and death, beauty and disgust, familiarity and discomfort coexist in one enigmatic creation. In doing so, her works provoke a specific anxiety, akin to the experience of the uncanny, that invites viewers to suspend belief and immerse themselves in an uncomfortable realm of constant instability and never-ending change.
