Kähler at CHART Design Fair August 2019

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The Kåhler pottery was founded by Joachim Christian Hermann Kähler in 1839 and this exhibition at Den Frie - for the CHART Design Fair - is in part to mark their 180th anniversary. 

Initially, Kähler produced stoves and cooking pots and kitchenwares. Two sons - Hermann A Kähler and his younger brother Carl Frederik Kähler - took over the factory in 1872. After a fire in 1875, a new factory was established and the company began producing finer ceramics, particularly vases, and began working with ceramic artists including H Brendekilde, L A Ring and Carl Lund and later Karl Hansen Reistrup and then Svend Hammershøi who became the artistic director of the company. 

Kähler experimented with shapes, glazes - particularly a hallmark deep red lustre - and with decorative techniques of painting by hand.

The exhibition here showed a range of their pieces through the history of the factory that show how, as a commercial company, they had to respond to changes of fashion but also, by employing well-established and talented artists, they could also set certain styles. 

Plaster casts for slip-pouring moulded, rather than thrown, pieces and sample strips of glaze colours gave some insight into the technical aspects of the high-quality ceramics.

In 1974 the factory was sold to Næstved municipality and then passed through a number of owners including Holmegaard but since 2018 has been part of the Rosendahl Group.

Kähler

CHART DESIGN 2018

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This is the sixth ‘edition’ of CHART but, for the first time, there is also a CHART Design Fair at the gallery of Den Frie on Oslo Plads in Østerport where twelve galleries from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are showing furniture and contemporary glass and ceramics.

In the basement gallery at Den Frie is an installation by benandsebastian entitled Department of Voids … a space in two halves divided by a glass wall with the two parts mirrored … one with empty museum storage cases and the answering part beyond the glass with the objects reimagined and in glass.

Den Frie
benandsebastian

Abstracta by Kasper Akhøj from Galleri Feldt

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Galleri Feldt were at CHART DESIGN at Den Frie gallery in Copenhagen with a fascinating show of the display system designed by Poul Cadovius in 1960. 

It was a modular system with metal tubing connected by knuckled joints to form cubes of different sizes to create a flexible display system for exhibitions. The joints were the key to the system - each with up to six prongs in eight different shapes. Cadovius even used scaled up frames to construct geodesic-style domes that were used at the Copenhagen Furniture Fair in 1961. 

A module of the system is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art - donated by the business man Charles Mauro after he negotiated with Cadovius to manufacture and sell the tubing and the links or joins in the USA. 

In 2006, when travelling through the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the Danish artist Kasper Akhøj was intrigued by what seemed to be an almost ubiquitous display system surviving in shops and department stores but also used on the street for market stalls. 

Then, and on subsequent trips over the following twelve years, he pieced together the story of how the Danish system was produced first in China and sold to the Yugoslavian state and then was manufactured in various forms in Yugoslavia … the spread of the system reflecting the complex political situation and an uneasy relationship with the concept and then the reality of consumerism in a communist political system. Akhøj  acquired pieces and their packaging and part of the collection was on show at Den Frie.

Galleri Feldt have produced a pamphlet - a folded poster - with text by Ronah Sadan setting out the story. To quote the conclusion ……

“… the history embedded in the structures Akhøj produces, imbues them with ontological instability and, by extension, turns them into symbols for the vulnerability of artistic agency: as Abstracta’s fate ultimately eluded Cadovius’ control, the fate of Akhøj’s work - and of works of art in general - is ultimately not in its originator’s hands.”