Anders Herwald Ruhwald is a Danish-American sculptor. He works primarily in clay, a medium he has been drawn to since he was 15. Ruhwald's work blends references from functional objects to classical sculpture and can take the form of singular objects as well as immersive installations In 2024 he was awarded a fellowshipin Fine Arts from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Early life and education Ruhwald completed his BFA at the Royal Danish Academy in Bornholm, Denmark in 2000. While there, he apprenticed for artist Jun Kaneko, whose work had a lasting influence on his practice. Ruhwald finished his MA at Royal College of Art in London in 2005, studying under Martin Smith, Allison Britton and Emmanuel Cooper.
Career Central to Ruhwald's work is the idea that "the messy practicality of objects is something to be embraced and not occluded" and his work can be understood as an amalgamation of both art and design without giving regard to the hierarchies normally assigned to these. Instead, Ruhwald's work implies that "subjectivity arises in the perception of differences, one that is both durational and spatially determined". Ruhwald's work is rooted "the 20th century Scandinavian tradition of the Formgiver in which the artisan compensates for modernity and our enigmatic dissatisfaction with it". His work is often highly crafted and a large part of his practice is dedicated to material experimentation and surface development, and as a result Glenn Adamson has noted that "for all their compressed particularity, [his] sculptures are also enlivened by inexhaustible nuance. Ruhwald takes seriously the idea that surface is where form interfaces with spatial context, so his surfaces have an intensity in all registers".
Solo presentations of Ruhwald's work have been mounted at Indianapolis Museum of Art; Casa Museo Jorn, Italy; MOCA Cleveland; Kunstner Forbundet, Norway; The Saarinen House, Cranbrook Art Museum, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK. In 2019, he completed the permanent installation Unit 1: 3583 Dubois St in Detroit, supported by the Knight Foundation, The Graham Foundation, The Gilbert Family Foundation, and the Danish Art Foundation.
In 2011, Ruhwald won the Gold Prize at the Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennial in South Korea, and he was awarded the Sotheby's Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2007.
His works is the included collections of Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, US; Philadelphia Museum of Art, US; Detroit Institute of Art, US; Indianapolis Museum of Art, US; The Denver Art Museum, US; The British Crafts Council; Nasjonal Museet, Oslo, Norway; Musee de Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway; Icheon World Ceramic Center, South Korea; Röhsska Museum, Sweden; Musée Magnelli, Vallauris, France; Design Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark; Clay Museum, Denmark; and Design Museum, Helsinki, Finland.
Ruhwald is also a teacher and has taught sculpture and ceramics in North America and Europe. He was an assistant professor at NSCAD in Halifax, Canada in 2005/06, CU Boulder in Colorado in 2007, An associate professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007/08 and the Artist in Residence and Head of Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 2008 until he resigned in 2017. From 2018 to 2022, he was a visiting professor at The National Academy of Art in Norway.
Notable exhibitions Century Garden, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN 2020 The Hand is the Mind is the Bomb that Blows, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada, 2018 Unit 1: 3583 Dubois, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH, 2016 One thing follows the other (and you make it happen), The David Ousley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, 2013 The Anatomy of a Home, Saarinen House, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 2013 You in between, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, 2008
Published works Monographs Ruhwald vs. Stålhane (Jönsson, Love, ed.), Essays by Love Jönsson, Shelley Selim, Martina Margetts and Anders Ruhwald, Rian Design Museum, 2022, The Body, The Mind, This Constructed World (Bochicchio, Luca Ed.), Essays by Luca Bochichio, Glenn Adamson, Ruth Baumeister, Casa Museo Jorn, 2018, The Anatomy of a Home (Wittkopp, G, ed.), Essays by Claudine Ise, Love Jönsson, Asdis Olafsdottir and Anders Ruhwald, Cranbrook Art Museum, USA, 2013, Anders Ruhwald, 2009–10, Lemberg Gallery, Detroit, 2010 You in Between (Beighton, James, ed.), Essays by Louise Mazanti, Ezra Shales and Glenn Adamson, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK, 2008 Form and Function, Essay by Edmund de Waal, Exhibition Catalogue for IngerMolin Gallery, Sweden, 2007
Essays At Søge, Finde og Huske (To Search, Find and Retain), in Ruhwald vs. Stålhane (Jönsson, Love, ed.) Rian Design Museum, 2022, The Anatomy of a Home in Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture (Brown, Christie; Julian Stair; Clare Twomey, eds.) Routledge, 2016 pp. 73–85
Publications Ceramic Art And Civilization, Greenhalgh, Paul, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Great Britain, 2021, , pp. 9, 468, 469 Ler er Livet!, (Wirnfeldt, Pia, ed.), Clay Museum of Ceramic Art, , pp 54, 139 With Eyes Wide Open: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932, (Blauvelt, Andrew, ed.), Cranbrook Art Museum, 2020 pp. 504–05 Rejsen som Redskab (Elna Svenle, ed.), Vandalorum, Sweden, 2020 pp. 34–42 and 116–17 Objects USA (Adamson, Glenn, ed.), Monacelli Press, New York, 2020 pp. 188–89 Landlord Colors (Blauvelt, Andrew, Judi Duki, Laura Mott and Ian Gabriel Wilson, eds.), Cranbrook Art Museum, p. 250 Vitamin C: Clay and Ceramics in Contemporary Art (Morrill, Rebecca, ed.), Phaidon Press Limited, 2017 pp. 258–61 Contemporary Clay, Ericson, Heather Mae (ed.), WCU Fine Arts Museum, Western Carolina University, pp 14, 54–55, Contemporary Clay and Museum Culture (Brown, Chiristie; Julian Stair; Clare Twomey, eds.) Routledge, 2016 pp. 73–85 The Making Process, (Cho, Hyeyoung, Ed.) 2015 Cheongju Craft Biennial, pp. 282–289, 2011 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennial, (Choi, Hong-Chul, ed.), Korea Ceramics Foundation, 2011 pp. 34–35, 204, 210 XXe Biennale Internationale de Céramique Contemporaine de Vallauris (Peltier, Yves, ed.) Somogy Editions, Paris, pp. 170–173 2008
References
External links