Veronica Pöschl

1950 - 2006

1975-1980, Hochschule für Gestaltung, Linz
1980-1981, Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam

Carla Koch Gallery will dedicate an exhibition to the work of ceramics artist Veronika Pöschl, who died last year. During the last few years, she collaborated with the Gallery as an artist.
She is considered a very important ceramics artist, who, after graduating from the Rietveld Academy in 1981, built a very original, impressive line of work.
The large retrospective in the National Museum of Ceramics, Het Princessehof, in 1999 was convincing proof hereof (catalogue).

In 1980, after graduating a as ceramics artist in Austria, she joined the Rietveld Academy where she gained interest in working with porcelain, which she maintained as her working material until her graduation in 1981.
At the Academy, she also got in contact with glass and, fascinated by the material, she decided to follow up on her studies at the glass faculty. This yielded a series of intriguing objects in which she first only used glass and metal and subsequently started working with glass and porcelain. Finally, she abandoned working with glass because she did not feel skilled enough to work with it, which gave her the feeling that she was not wholly in control of her own work.

Stoneware
As of 1984, she primarily worked with stoneware.
In her work, Veronika Pöschl used two basic ceramics techniques.
The first objects she manually shaped from clay and not on the wheel. Later she started using manually rolled out strands of clay from which she built up her shapes. The sober colours are worked into the clay. Differences in colour also emerge by blending and combining clay of various ages. A number of important stages can be identified in her work.
In 1984, she made lying, cone-shaped objects with a turned-up edge. She did not add any decoration; the decoration had to emerge from the working process. In her case, by rolling up and cutting slabs of clay in different colours.
After these objects, the "signs" high erect shapes emerge. Her interest lied in particular with the posture she gave these shapes.
Later, Veronika returned to pot shapes and discovered that she could actually explore all of her ideas within this concept.
Her last series of work, which was displayed in the Gallery in 2003, consists of "heads" that were abstracted from the pot shape with their tops worked open, which refers to the resonance body of emotions and impressions the head represents.

Below you find a selection of her work
None of the works are available any more