Iris Nesher
Fragility and vulnerability, impermanence and transformation stand at the core of Tel-Aviv-based ceramicist Iris Nesher’s oeuvre. Whereas it is cracks, cuts, or fragmented elements, her pieces reflect a broken continuity, fragmented memories, and her narrative tell the delicate story of her personal experience in the most delicate material – white porcelain. While Nesher’s work is highly personal, at the same time, she is allowing her audience to make their own interpretations by connecting to their memory and by evoking their own personal or collective recollections and stirring a strong emotional response. Challenges, joy, pain, tensions, fear, and the transition between life and death, between the presence and the absence are embedded in her beautiful functional sculptures. In celebrating her first solo show at Les Ateliers Courbet, she created functional sculptures.
‘When we are born, we arrive whole—not yet touched by experience, unfragmented,’ she illuminates the narrative of her artwork. ‘But as we grow and face life’s challenges, a chasm begins to form within us. I have always been drawn to this inner fracture and the way it shapes us.’ Her pieces come to reflect and reveal the complexity of life experience in the most direct way, but also to suggest ways to overcome pain and difficulties, and to find comfort within them. ‘We mourn ourselves; we mourn the way we were. The way we are no longer. The way we will one day no longer be,’ she says.
Nesher’s sculptures are crafted exclusively in porcelain excavated in the French town of Limoges, famously discovered during the Golden Age of European porcelain of the 18th century. The malleable clay of Limoges has been praised for its whiteness, purity, and strength, and for her, it has been the perfect tool to achieve the plasticity and delicacy, allowing her to form her signature forms – their expressiveness, damaged, fractured, and broken charisma, reflecting melancholy and loss on the way to discovering ways of healing. The imperfection is the first thing you notice in Nesher’s objects, celebrating authenticity, impermanence, and the incomplete, as mirroring the human experience, but they also embody freshness, cleanness, harmony, and uniformity, as the monochromatic helps her to express the powerful narratives.
Nesher presents her design objects here for the first time. Emerging from her art photography and her fine art projects into design has been natural to her, as her objects fuse the functional with the emotional, the expected with the unexpected, the minimalist and the expressive, the mysterious and the clear, the quite and the dramatic. Her dynamic compositions stir a strong emotional response, capturing tensions, excitement, and powerful visual storytelling, which are the central values in contemporary design.
Her solo show will be on view at Ateliers Courbet through May 1st, 2026.
