Anders Herwald Ruhwald’s outdoor exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Garden at Newfields, titled Century Garden, features ten large-scale ceramic works that both reference and coalesce with the natural world as they traverse the tradition of outdoor garden sculpture. These biomorphic looking objects, some of which hold plants and others that double as seating, linger on the border between abstraction and utility and engages with the garden at Newfields in a way that simultaneously interrupts and embellishes. Some look as though they have been excavated from the deep sea and feel decidedly organic despite their glazing treatments – sometimes technicolor and at other times rococo. Naturalistic lumps and humps flatten out in areas to present a chair or open up like craters to provide containers for plants or nests for birds. Ruhwald experiments with scale, texture, color, and form to create these adaptive abstractions that visually converse with evolution, and physically, with landscape and architecture.

Anders Herwald Ruhwald (b. 1974, Randers, Denmark) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2005. Ruhwald has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (Cleveland, OH); Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art (Middlesborough, UK); The Museum of Art and Design (Copenhagen, Denmark); and the Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI). His work is included in over 20 public museum collections, such as The Victoria and Albert Museum; The Denver Art Museum; The Detroit Institute of Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; The National Museum, Sweden; and Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taiwan. Century Garden is open to the public until October 11, 2020.

Special thanks to Shelley Selim, Curator of Design & Decorative Arts and Interim Director of Curatorial Affairs. Photographs by Samantha McCain Veach. Videography by Jeremiah Nickerson. Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields