Artist Klara Kristalova Taps Into Our Childhood Memories With Her Upcoming Exhibition at Galerie Perrotin

Her ceramic creations are dark, strange, yet still familiar.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Sweden-based artist Klara Kristalova takes viewers into a dark, curious, yet familiar setting with "UNDERWORLD," her first solo exhibition in New York at Galerie Perrotin. It is a place inhabited by strange and lonely souls, ceramic characters that look "as if they have just escaped from a cruel tale, waiting for a passerby to stop and indicate the way." 

Childhood and circuses are key themes in Kristalova's "UNDERWORLD." In fact, much of Kristalova's ceramic creations are meant to evoke memories from our own childhood. For her show at New York's Galerie Perrotin, Kristalova offers a new set of characters from a mysterious circus. The cast comprises performing acrobats, a bird with a girl's face, a boy with insect wings, a magician's daughter, and other whimsical, odd creatures. Though her ceramic figures look like characters from a storybook, they seem to embody the human quality of being both good and evil. Each one of Kristalova's figures wears such vulnerable expressions of fear, love, sadness, and guilt, it's difficult not to empathize with her ceramic creations.

"UNDERWORLD" opens at Galerie Perrotin in New York on Feb. 27 and will be on view until April 26, 2014.

[via GaleriePerrotin]

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