Part I. Salutations of Material, Exaltations of Materiality
Part II. Interview with Niels Dietrich
Interview with Niels Dietrich
By Doug Navarra
In May 2024, the Peter Freeman Gallery in NYC put me in direct contact with Niels Dietrich, the founder of the ceramic workshop in Cologne, Germany, who helped facilitate all the works in the Made in Cologne exhibition. We agreed to exchange an email dialogue to elucidate the workshop’s unique relationship to this exhibition and the field of ceramics.
Your workshop appears to be at the nexus of this exhibition, Made in Cologne. All of these works and artists eventually found their way to your atelier to have their statements realized in clay. I’m interested in how and when this all started.
It was the early 1980s, and I was studying ceramic product design at the Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld, Germany. As it happened, the artist Norbert Prangenberg came to our school, and I started helping him with his first works in ceramics. I was very familiar with the ceramic process and the building of kilns. Consequently, I found that I could guide his ideas.
I’m assuming that must have been a relatively short tenure at the school.
Yes, true, but it was very interesting, and we developed a close friendship from our collaborations. Upon graduation, I opened my own workshop in Oedt. Norbert would come back many, many times. The challenge for me was to build bigger and bigger kilns to accommodate his larger-scale works, which he started exhibiting at the Karsten Greve Gallery in Cologne.
It must have been interesting to be in such close contact with the gallery and the artists who came through there.
Oh, for sure. It was a fine arts milieu, and I was in direct contact with paintings by the likes of Cy Twombly and ceramic sculptures by Lucio Fontana. It was all very inspiring.
Would you say this affected the direction of the workshop atelier as well?
Absolutely! I felt it was a unique situation collaborating with fine artists who wanted to work with ceramics but had little experience. You have to remember that back in the early 1980’s, artisanal ceramic statements were limited in the fine arts while the medium was overly compartmentalized as craft. It was around this time that Norbert introduced me to a friend, the artist Thomas Schutte. That collaboration started after we relocated the workshop to Cologne. The first project in 1989 we realized in Cologne was the “Black Lemons“ by Thomas Schütte, which will be in his retrospective at MOMA in NYC this Fall (2024).
Wow! Now you find yourself collaborating with two visual artists who possessed an unbridled freedom with clay, so uninhibited by the medium itself. Must have been wild!
It was totally wild, and in many ways, it was all new ground. Over the years, many visual artists followed. I would have to calibrate how to help the artists, what they needed to know, and how to express their ideas without compromising the statement. This kind of effort varies considerably with each and every artist who comes here.
I’d like to take this thought a bit further because you’re a specialist working with fine artists. Even though they may come from different places or have varied backgrounds, they pass through the workshop. I’m thinking of materiality born through the workshop acting as a kind of “filter” that transforms ideas into reality. Can you expand upon this idea?
A few small details may give you a better understanding of our place with artists. We are very few people. We have a small and limited space. We work for and with artists and have no production of our own. We take our job seriously. This might be a German cultural attitude, but we are “Treue Hunde“. This must sound strange, but we are very loyal and very faithful. I don’t know the right translation, but artists can always trust us to be with them and with their work, always! Even in difficult times, even in difficult years… there is no divorce… As a result, many ideas for great artworks were “invented” in the Cologne workshop.
That’s very interesting. Can you please explain that further?
First, I’d say we need to be more close to the artist than to the material. If, in fact, we would start with the limitation of the material, then we would have no chance to come to where we want to be. In a way, we don’t care about what the material wants or needs. That comes later, much later. All the questions or rules about making ceramics are not in the room… they are not allowed to be in the room!
This brings me back to your very first experience while working with Norbert Prangenberg.
This is very emotional for me! Yes, Norbert was the artist who set the tone, who helped create the original “template” of what we could expect from each other as fabricator and artist, as facilitator and idea-maker. He came many times to the workshop with respect to what had been made of this material before, but he was always interested in what came next!
He had no limitations in thinking, and this is what we supported then and have supported with every artist who has come to the atelier thereafter.
You are both noble and humble in all that you do. But please allow me to ask how you ultimately want to define this workshop’s legacy.
Legacy? OK, when I think of the artist John Cage, for instance, I think of him as an artist who liberated sounds from music. Perhaps in a similar manner, we are doing that here by making an effort to liberate clay and glaze from ceramic sculpture. In that sense, we would like to be a difference maker.
Doug Navarra is a visual artist who has an extensive background in working with clay. He lives in Hudson Valley, New York.
Niels Dietrich is the founder of a ceramics workshop used by some of the most important contemporary artists.
Made in Cologne: Fifteen artists working at the ceramics atelier of Niels Dietrich is on view at Peter Freeman, Inc. through July 19, 2024.
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