Using the skills he perfected as a ceramics restorer, Bouke de Vries takes broken, discarded ceramic pieces and rethinks them. In his new series of “exploded” artworks, de Vries freezes the most traumatic moment of a piece’s history. Whether Ming or Meissen, he sees the beauty in their destruction and remakes them into something current and thought-provoking.

Instead of reconstructing the object- he deconstructs it, and while others would hide the imperfections- he emphasises them and moves the object’s story forward by instilling a new value into it. The spaces in between the fragments become an essential part of the structure and the objects sometimes take on a cubist quality where characters and chimeras juxtapose history and modern life, bouncing off both.