Artist Birthday: Anders Ruhwald

Anders Ruhwald is an artist whose works blur the line between sculpture and design. One of his key interests is in the contrasting of textures of different materials.

Artist Birthday for 5 November: Anders Ruhwald (born 1974 Denmark/US)

Anders Ruhwald, Laminated Pinewood Bowl, Charred. Smolder-fired Earthenware Bowl, Cracked and Mended, 2014, repurposed pine and terra cotta with gold leaf inlay, wooden bowl (left): 22.9 x 25.4 x 76.2 cm; terracotta bowl: 22.9 x 30.5 x 76.2 cm Philadelphia Museum of Art, © 2025 Anders Ruhwald (PMA-8527)

Ruhwald's work often explores ideas through the language of decorative arts, such as the two bowls in this piece. But the emphasis is not on the forms themselves (or their utility), but rather in the contrast of surface textures and comparison of the effects of laminating and charring. In the case of the latter two, Ruhwald's manipulations of wood and ceramic has yielded similar results in color and value. Both objects have decorative surfaces, the wood in its gouge marks, and the clay in the mottled, swirling char marks. For added sophistication, Ruhwald has borrowed the Japanese method of decorative mending ceramic cracks in the kingutsi ("golden journey") method of gold-leaf infused resin. These works occupy a space equidistant between sculpture and design. The juxtaposition of a wood piece with a similar piece in ceramic is a typical way Ruhwald displays his works, with an emphasis on process.

Background

In the early 1900s, many Danish artists participated in the numerous modernist art movements that evolved from the major European artistic centers. Before the end of World War II (1939-1945), modernists from many countries in Europe gravitated towards the centers of modern experiment in the Netherlands, Germany, and France. The most broadly based group, which flourished between 1948 and 1951 was CoBrA, an assortment of various abstractionists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam. Similar to that period, many Danish contemporary artists have been educated abroad and typically live and work in Berlin or New York. Danish institutions, such as the Royal Danish Academy and Danish Art Council, formerly conservative institutions, embraced artistic innovation and avant-garde movements starting in the 1980s. The Danish contemporary art scene is more pluralistic, exploring a wide variety of expression, art forms and themes, appropriating from both high and low cultures.

Anders Ruhwald was born in Randers, Denmark. He is a sculptor whose work is grounded in ceramics. He received a BFA (2000) from the Royal Danish Academy, Bornholm, where he studied with Japanese American large-scale ceramic sculptor Jun Kaneko (born 1942). Kaneko's work, in his emphasis on surface qualities, had a major impact on Ruhwald's mature style. Ruhwald also received an MFA (2005) from the Royal College of Art, London. He now lives and works in Detroit and Chicago.