217 - Jan de Rooden (1931–2016)

Jan de Rooden (1931–2016) Sculptural vase Glazed stoneware Date of creation: circa 1960 H 40, L 51, D 14 cm Jan de Rooden (1931–2016) was a Dutch ceramicist and sculptor who worked in Nijmegen, Paris, and Amsterdam. Self-taught, he began working in 1956 in the studio of ceramicist Lucie Q. Bakker in Amsterdam. In 1958, he founded his own studio with Johnny Rolf, whom he would later marry. In 1962, De Rooden participated in an exhibition of six young Amsterdam-based ceramic artists at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, alongside Hans de Jong, Sonja Landweer, Johan van Loon, Johnny Rolf, and Jan van der Vaart. This exhibition marked the renaissance of artisanal ceramics in the Netherlands. Weighing seventy kilograms, this sculpture highlights the density of solid oak, which Alban Lanore shapes here through fire. The surface charring—a technique similar to the Japanese yakisugi—blackens and hollows out the wood, revealing the relief of the growth rings and giving it a deep texture. The piece’s horizontal form evokes a fragment of architecture or landscape, somewhere between a beam, a pedestal, and a monolith. A work in which the raw material, transformed by the elements, becomes the very subject of the sculpture.