This spring, The Hepworth Wakefield presents a major retrospective of pioneering artist Elizabeth Fritsch (b.1940, Whitchurch, UK). The exhibition brings together over 100 works made by Fritsch since the 1970s, as a survey of her extraordinary sculptural forms and painterly techniques. The exhibition is largely drawn from the artists own rarely-seen private collection with key loans from public and private collections, and unseen archive material to tell the story of this innovative artist. A must-see for anyone interested in modern ceramics.
In the mid-1960s, Fritsch taught herself to hand-build pots, before enrolling at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. She studied under Eduardo Paolozzi and Lucie Rie, as well as her main mentor, Hans Coper. Graduating in 1971, Fritsch was associated with the ‘New Ceramics’ group, a group of female RCA graduates including Alison Britton, Jill Crowley, Carol McNicoll and Jacqueline Poncelet who questioned functional and utilitarian notions of the vessel. Their expressive forms and use of vivid colours initiated a significant shift in post-war British studio pottery towards the more sculptural and expressive possibilities of ceramics.
Fritsch will work with the exhibition’s curator, Dr Abi Shapiro to carefully compose groups of vessels that reveal dialogues between the adjacent forms. Explaining the importance in the way the pots are arranged, Fritsch said: “The spaces between pots assembled in groups is, to me, more lovely and musical than any of the spatial relationships which may be incorporated into an individual piece. These groups are I suppose like movements in classical music – in which the arrangement adds up, hopefully, to more than the sum of its parts… enabling a dance and play in space.”
The exhibition runs until Spring 2026.