Veronica Brovall: ceramics with balls

(Veronica Brovall, Run Back for Pants, 2012 & I Saw the Devil, 2012 - courtesy Hopstreet Gallery Brussels © document-exhibitions.com)

Ceramics don’t really have a great reputation. They are often seen as somewhat old-fashioned. Or as a kind of occupational therapy for amateur artists and bored housewives. But for some time now the medium has been making a comeback in contemporary art. Grayson Perry, Sterling Ruby, Rosemarie Trockel, and in this part of the world Nadia Naveau – the list of artists now working in ceramics is a long one. It also includes Veronica Brovall, a Swede who lives in Berlin. At the Hopstreet Gallery she is currently exhibiting a number of sculptures that break radically with the medium’s frumpy image. Her work has a bold energy about it, in which sex and violence are intertwined. One of the works presents a pair of woman’s legs in the air; next to the opening between the legs, letters spell out “Fuck Here”. One leg carries on into a hand with a raised thumb; the other ends in a number of red-painted tongues. The sculpture’s pedestal (Brovall makes one herself for every work) is surrounded by a chain. I Saw the Devil, looks like a cardboard box with a saddle on top. On the front there is an opening; “Here Fuck” is written above it. “Expose the Bait” is the exhibition’s expressive title. Full Moon in the City is a female torso whose breasts are raised invitingly towards the observer. Other works are more abstract in nature, but Brovall maintains the same formal idiom throughout, with features such as tongues, raised thumbs, and chains recurring even in those works. The colour palette is deliberately limited to black, white, grey, and red. But there are also influences from graffiti and comic strips. The added letters recall street art, while some elements, such as the grotesque raised thumbs, have something caricatural about them. Brovall’s work convinces thanks to its raw energy. It is a raised middle finger – or, to maintain the atmosphere of the works themselves, a kick between the legs.

Veronica Brovall: Expose The Bait > 27/10, do/je/Th > za/sa/Sa 14 > 18.00, gratis/gratuit/free, HOPSTREET GALLERY, Hopstraat 7 rue du Houblon, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-511.05.55, www.hopstreet.be