Jesse Wine

Young Man Red is an installation that recalls not only Alexander Calder’s mobiles, but also the work of Karel Appel and of De Stijl. Jesse Wine (b. 1983) often looks to other artists for inspiration, but then interprets their ideas in his own highly individual way. Like many other artists today, he chooses to use ceramic techniques to express emotion. “Because,” he says, “ceramics often quite literally reveal the hand of the artist.”

Jesse Wine is a member of a generation of young English artists – also including people like Laura Aldridge, Aaron Angell and Giles Round – who are currently engaged in (successfully) exploring the potential of clay. Not to create domestic wares, but to claim a place within the world of contemporary art. Wine employs a range of ceramic techniques and experiments with glazes. He sometimes creates new versions of work by other ceramic artists, but he also uses clay to tell his own, often highly personal, stories. Young Man Red offers a peek into the lifestyle of this red-haired young man. His bright red body-warmer, blue shorts, cap and trainers are the starting point for mobiles that recall the work of Calder but each evoke a different episode in his own personal life: lunch, a working situation, or getting dressed in the morning and deciding which particular trainers to wear that day.

The basic elements in his Young Man Red installation were previously on show at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle (UK) back in 2014. But the installation in The Hague will be specifically tailored to the new venue: the Gemeentemuseum’s Projects Gallery. It is important to Wine that his work should meld not only with the architectural setting, but even with the museum’s collection and exhibition programme. For that reason, the Hague version of the installation will reference De Stijl and will be accompanied by a new work inspired by a dish by Karel Appel (the subject of a major concurrent retrospective at the museum). Wine is a fan of those Cobra artists who used ceramics, as he does, to express emotion. The Appel dish illustrates the point perfectly and will therefore be included in his presentation.

Jesse Wine trained at Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art (RCA). He stumbled on ceramics when he was an exchange student in New York and was immediately hooked by the potential of clay. His installation fits perfectly within the Gemeentemuseum’s ongoing attempts to put the current artistic re-evaluation of clay on the public map. It follows the museum’s recent exhibition Clay!, will run concurrently with an exhibition of French ceramics and precedes a show of work by Helly Oestreicher later in 2016.