Newcastle University

Markus Karstieß studied in the Masterclass of Jannis Kounellis at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. From February 2013 he will be the Lipman Fellow in Ceramics at Newcastle University.

Working with the age-old ceramic material of clay, Markus Karstieß has always rigorously taken it to its limits. Yet unlike, say, Thomas Schütte in the 1980s, he did not seek to engage the possibilities of figurative sculpture; he set out from something at once abstract and physical: the negative imprint of the hand grasping the soft clay. Out of this genuinely plastic gesture, Karstieß developed sculptural structures in quasi-natural irregular shapes— and he seemed to be kneading the most diverse literary trouvailles into the viscous mass, from the Romantics to Fantasy and Science Fiction (…) .

Text: Doris Krystof, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

Recent exhibitions: Ancient & Modern, London (2012), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2012), Krefelder Kunstverein (2012), VAN HORN, Düsseldorf (2011), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2010), Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2010), 11. Triennial Fellbach, GER (2010) He lives and works in Düsseldorf, Solingen and in 2013 in Newcastle. http://www.karstiess.de/