Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of the artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at the MACRO in Italy in 2023, titled The Bidet and the Jar. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the MACRO’s director Luca Lo Pinto, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2018.
Through the use of traditional craft production techniques and materials, the British-French artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel explore potential forms of sculptural practice and their relationship to manual labour. Their work—which lies between representation and function, the ready-made and craftsmanship—engages with popular imagery and produces a symbolic and functional displacement of everyday objects.
The Bidet and the Jar is a response to the experimental nature of MACRO’s Rehearsal section, and sees the artists further their forays into creating ceramic artworks, all the while maintaining a level of uncertainty with respect to the outcome. The stoneware sculptures are produced by the artists themselves using a traditional wood-fired kiln fabricated in their studio, dimensioned for a large scale of production. The size of the kiln, their commitment to hand modelling the clay, and the technique of high-temperature wood firing afford Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel the opportunity to develop a ceramic practice rooted in repetition and open to accidents and chance events. In contrast to this empirical and “artisan” approach, the duo have chosen to appropriate and refabricate a repertoire of industrial ceramics, habitually mass-produced within a factory environment.
