Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal (b. 1964, Nottingham) is an internationally acclaimed artist and writer, best known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels, often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place. De Waal’s project for Ivorypress, breath, is an homage to the poetry of Paul Celan, which has been a constant inspiration for the artist in exhibitions such as Atemwende at Gagosian, New York; or the collector (for Paul) at the V&A, London, among others. Recent exhibitions include a response to the Viennese émigré architect Rudolph Schindler at the Schindler House, Los Angeles; to the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi at Artipelag, Stockholm; and the collection of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, curated on the theme of anxiety. Kneaded Knowledge, co-curated with Ai Weiwei, was shown at the National Gallery, Prague, and Kunsthaus, Graz. De Waal’s fascination with porcelain and white was the focus of a series of exhibitions including white at the Royal Academy of Arts, London; On White at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; and Lichtzwang for the Theseus Temple, Vienna. His most recent solo gallery shows include the poems of our climate at Gagosian, San Francisco, and Irrkunst at Galerie Max Hetzler with the Walter Benjamin Archive, Berlin. He is also renowned for his family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), which won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography. His second book, The White Road, was published in 2015.