A fascination with physics has influenced the strange shapes and geometric patterns of ceramicist Elizabeth Fritsch’s work for more than 50 years. She relishes optical illusions.
Fritsch, who describes herself as “a painter who makes pots”, hand-builds stoneware cups, bowls, pouring vessels and vases. She paints them using coloured clay slips with designs inspired by science, music, mathematics and Surrealist literature; occasionally they are left unadorned to emphasise their form. From March 8 the Hepworth Wakefield is hosting Elizabeth Fritsch: Otherworldly Vessels, featuring more than 100 pieces created between the early 1970s and early 2010s.
Fritsch belongs to a cohort of pioneering ceramicists, including Alison Britton, Jacqueline Poncelet and Carol McNicoll, who studied at the Royal College of Art in London in the 1970s. The group is renowned for taking the hitherto earnest world of British studio pottery into playfully postmodern directions. Yet despite her influence, Fritsch — now in her mid-eighties — has not had a large-scale show since 2010.
“It is definitely overdue,” says the exhibition’s curator Abi Shapiro. Not only that, but “we’re now in a place where museums are exhibiting pots as fine art”. Market interest is growing, too: in 2022, “Quantum Pocket III” (2008) — a flattened, blue patterned vase shaped to give the appearance of a much rounder vessel when viewed from the front — sold at Christie’s for £15,120 against an estimate of £4,000-£6,000.
She is represented by Adrian Sassoon: at Frieze Masters in 2023 the gallery dedicated its booth to Fritsch’s ceramics. Her work can be found in public collections including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art.
Fritsch sees her pieces as existing in “two-and-a-half dimensions”: neither flat nor fully sculptural. “I like to think my work lies between the two-dimensionality of the painting and the three-dimensionality of the vessel,” she says.
Despite the precision of their shapes and patterns — which bring to mind Bridget Riley and MC Escher — she begins each piece without planning. Fritsch is a classically trained pianist and harpist who changed careers in 1965, due to stage fright. She taught herself to coil pots at her kitchen table. She compares her intuitive approach to that of musical improvisation. “Music is rooted at the core of my work,” she says, comparing her designs to “counterpoint, cross-rhythms, crescendos and concepts from free improvised jazz”.
Arrangement of pieces is paramount. Pots old and new are meticulously placed in fresh configurations, which at the Hepworth comprise anything from two to 14 works. In contrast to her spontaneous approach to individual works, she is “much more reflective about the interaction between my pots and what I call their ‘groupings’”.
“Elizabeth likens it to a musical arrangement,” says Shapiro. “Each pot is an individual note, but it’s the spaces between them that create rhythm, movement and momentum. Seeing works arranged in this way completely changes them — it’s almost like installation art.”
”Elizabeth Fritsch: Otherworldly Vessels”; The Hepworth Wakefield; from March 8 until spring 2026; hepworthwakefield.org
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