Aneta Regel was born in 1976 and grew up in northern Poland. She has many memories of her natural environment of her hometown , an impressive and rugged rural landscape dotted with huge boulders, round and smooth rocks full of fossils , and even anotropomorphic forms dating to the Ice Age. This unusual natural environment was the source of countless legends in the region , and the people long widely believed that these fossils had magical powers. Her current works now more than ever embody the transcental forces of nature , which provokes in her a wonder mixed with fear and respect.
After studying sculpture for four years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland , she moved to the UK and continued studying in the early 2000’s. She studied at the university of Westminster and then at the Royal College of Arts in London, where she graduated in 2006 with a degree in glass and ceramics. After graduation she opened her studio in Stoke Newington, where the chocolate Factory used to be, but which is now home to one of most active studios for artists in the heart of London. She has since worked on abstract sculptures of organic forms associated with natural phenomena, sometimes creating figurations (animal or anthropomorphic )to better depict the archaic forces that dominate the world despite the human determination to dominate and control the world by technology . The roughness of the surfaces , the convulsive or germinative movement of the forms, and the disturbing mix of the materials composing the forms give the impression that her sculptures are not workings of human hands or human mind but the result of antediluvian seismic shocks that have come to us directly from violent “ Big Bang “.
Her sculptures conjure up natural forms, such as trees , roots , mangroves , or rocky mounds covered with lichens. She mixes clay with crushed stones. This ‘ extreme chamotte” changes clay as messy as riverbed into fertile silt. Assemblages of stones and earth with rich combinations of volcanic rocks , basalt , granite and feldspars are partially thickly color –coated. This thick color is mixture of enamels made into coloured slip, like plaster . These give the magmatic forms a certain dynamic tension, in a disturbing balance between roughness and refinement of surface. Colours of moss , bark, or coral are exposed on the minerial and muddy asperities. Other sculptures in the shapes of animals are coated in a gloomy shade of tragic red , which conjures up images of ‘ the blood of the beasts “poured on the altar of sacrifice. The colors are partial and allusive, but always intense and radiating , sometimes reaching phosphorescence or incandescence .
The most interesting aspects of her exploration are the tremendous energy, rhythm , and impression that shapes are still emerging , primed but not complete . That the forms are unfinished in essence signifies the ambiguity and the fundamental enigma of the origins of humans and the earth in an intensive way. The metamorphic forces that the artists has unfolded seem all the more threatening and dramatic to us . Her work is more open to the kind of visceral emotion that everyone seeks through art. The sculptures of Aneta Regel mimic nature , but they appear before us as intruders. The viewers hesitate between fascination and fear , even disgust before this monstrous sculpture, which comes towards them in seemingly convulsive movements, like delirium of the imagination. We are stunned by the demontration of the passage of time fo all things , the infinite subtlety and melancholy feeling that Aneta Regel paradoxically manages to elicit in us through the power created by combining clay and rock. Her works unfold an assemble before us ,like guts of hallucinated realism, hypertrophied visions of a primary burst of some kind of power of nature overwhelming all human attempts at establishing order , refusing as much the design as the design. It is extremely unusual for an artist to reach the acme of her career through sculpture, overawing the viewers with so much humility and simplicity by the means employed .Aneta Regel’s forms are alive but somewhat indecisive, powerful but troublesome. They stand , sharpen, and bow , all at the same time resistant and fragile .This is indeed “psychoanalytic” work in that it seeks to make us sally forth into the wild forest of our own subconscious . This forest is a shadowy place that we reject as taboo, a place we more often refuse to enter , to recognize, and to search within ourselves . “
Frederic Bodet .Former Curator of Sevres National Museum for Ceramics.
Essay for Korean international Competition Ceramic Biennale 2019 Icheon where Aneta was awarded Excellence Prize in ceramics as expression category.
After studying sculpture for four years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland , she moved to the UK and continued studying in the early 2000’s. She studied at the university of Westminster and then at the Royal College of Arts in London, where she graduated in 2006 with a degree in glass and ceramics. After graduation she opened her studio in Stoke Newington, where the chocolate Factory used to be, but which is now home to one of most active studios for artists in the heart of London. She has since worked on abstract sculptures of organic forms associated with natural phenomena, sometimes creating figurations (animal or anthropomorphic )to better depict the archaic forces that dominate the world despite the human determination to dominate and control the world by technology . The roughness of the surfaces , the convulsive or germinative movement of the forms, and the disturbing mix of the materials composing the forms give the impression that her sculptures are not workings of human hands or human mind but the result of antediluvian seismic shocks that have come to us directly from violent “ Big Bang “.
Her sculptures conjure up natural forms, such as trees , roots , mangroves , or rocky mounds covered with lichens. She mixes clay with crushed stones. This ‘ extreme chamotte” changes clay as messy as riverbed into fertile silt. Assemblages of stones and earth with rich combinations of volcanic rocks , basalt , granite and feldspars are partially thickly color –coated. This thick color is mixture of enamels made into coloured slip, like plaster . These give the magmatic forms a certain dynamic tension, in a disturbing balance between roughness and refinement of surface. Colours of moss , bark, or coral are exposed on the minerial and muddy asperities. Other sculptures in the shapes of animals are coated in a gloomy shade of tragic red , which conjures up images of ‘ the blood of the beasts “poured on the altar of sacrifice. The colors are partial and allusive, but always intense and radiating , sometimes reaching phosphorescence or incandescence .
The most interesting aspects of her exploration are the tremendous energy, rhythm , and impression that shapes are still emerging , primed but not complete . That the forms are unfinished in essence signifies the ambiguity and the fundamental enigma of the origins of humans and the earth in an intensive way. The metamorphic forces that the artists has unfolded seem all the more threatening and dramatic to us . Her work is more open to the kind of visceral emotion that everyone seeks through art. The sculptures of Aneta Regel mimic nature , but they appear before us as intruders. The viewers hesitate between fascination and fear , even disgust before this monstrous sculpture, which comes towards them in seemingly convulsive movements, like delirium of the imagination. We are stunned by the demontration of the passage of time fo all things , the infinite subtlety and melancholy feeling that Aneta Regel paradoxically manages to elicit in us through the power created by combining clay and rock. Her works unfold an assemble before us ,like guts of hallucinated realism, hypertrophied visions of a primary burst of some kind of power of nature overwhelming all human attempts at establishing order , refusing as much the design as the design. It is extremely unusual for an artist to reach the acme of her career through sculpture, overawing the viewers with so much humility and simplicity by the means employed .Aneta Regel’s forms are alive but somewhat indecisive, powerful but troublesome. They stand , sharpen, and bow , all at the same time resistant and fragile .This is indeed “psychoanalytic” work in that it seeks to make us sally forth into the wild forest of our own subconscious . This forest is a shadowy place that we reject as taboo, a place we more often refuse to enter , to recognize, and to search within ourselves . “
Frederic Bodet .Former Curator of Sevres National Museum for Ceramics.
Essay for Korean international Competition Ceramic Biennale 2019 Icheon where Aneta was awarded Excellence Prize in ceramics as expression category.