Bruce M. Sherman
Madame Matisse, 2017
Ceramics is a medium that has long occupied an ambiguous place within the art world. Historically relegated to the realm of craft or design, it often lingered at the periphery of contemporary art discourse, overshadowed by painting, sculpture, and installation. Yet over the past decade, ceramics has undergone a remarkable shift, moving decisively from the margins to the center of attention. Dedicated ceramic art fairs such as Ceramic Brussels testify to this rise, while leading museums, galleries, and collections increasingly foreground clay as a material of critical and conceptual relevance. This article highlights thirty artists who exemplify this transformation. Selected through a combination of editorial curation and supported by the objective ranking system of ArtFacts, these artists demonstrate the breadth and vitality of ceramics today.
Bruce M. Sherman (b. 1942, New York, the United States) is a ceramic artist whose practice brings together figuration and abstraction in whimsical, anthropomorphic forms. His hand-thrown sculptures often combine cylinders and flat planes with stylized faces, disembodied expressions, and symbolic motifs such as hands, eyes, and plants. Balancing humor and reverence, surrealism and tradition, his totemic arrangements allude to themes of rebirth, renewal, prayer, and consciousness. As Sherman himself has remarked, “working in clay is almost like a way of praying.” Before dedicating himself fully to art, Sherman trained and worked as a dentist, while also engaging with craft and performance through the Society for Experimental Studies in the 1960s and 70s. His interest in Japanese Bunraku puppetry and stone-cutting during that period informed the theatrical and tactile qualities of his later ceramic work. Today, his sculptures—ranging from mythical creatures to house-like forms populated by miniature figures, ladders, and potted plants—embody playfulness and spiritual depth. Sherman lives and works in New York, the United States.