I ce: Two Masterworks on Loan from The Long Museum is one of two inaugural exhibitions taking place concurrently on the ground floor of Sotheby's Maison. Presented in the Sanctum, the exhibition brings together two objects that transcend time and geography – inviting visitors on a journey to Another World.

E nshrouded in a frozen landscape of atmospheric beauty, a chance encounter between an exquisite piece of Song dynasty Ru ware and the mesmeric Eisberg by Gerhard Richter begins an aesthetic and thematic dialogue between these two objects scattered across time and space. Like the surface of a great, slowly moving glacier, these two objects form a symphony of luminous blue and crackled grey across the centuries, their surfaces illuminated by anomalous ruptures and sudden changes of light.

The Ru, with its glowing, intense blue-green glaze and interlaced ‘ice crackle’ has over the course of a millennium gained mythical status as an emblem of Chinese philosophy and aesthetics. With a monolithic shard of forbidding ice at its compositional heart, Richter’s Eisberg captures the mesmeric beauty of the mist-enshrouded frozen seascape of the polar latitudes, where “A mirage-like arctic splendour towered all around, a weird, unearthly architecture of ice” (Anna Kavan, Ice, p.172). 

Evoking patriotic sentiments and nostalgic thoughts of glorious eras of China’s past, the Ru guanyao, the official ware of the late Northern Song (960-1127) court from the kilns in Ruzhou, are of outstanding rarity. Eliciting fervent devotion, these deceptively modest ceramic pieces play an extraordinary role in the history of China, being conceptually connected to philosophical ideas of life in tune with nature, and aesthetically to a sophisticated taste for artlessness and excellence. “I understand beauty evokes times past, Why need it rival in elegance with ostentatious pieces!” said Qianlong Emperor, 44th year of the Qianlong period, Qing dynasty (1779). With its luminous glaze and complex interlaced ‘ice crackle’ patterning, this washer will have been handled with reverential care over thousands of generations during its nine-century-long history, carrying with it an “incredible glacial dream scene” (Anna Kavan, Ice, p.20) of times since past.
 

Radiating with the atmospheric light of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner’s romantic landscapes, Richter’s Eisberg was, according to the artist, similarly “motivated by the dream of a classical order and a pristine world – by nostalgia in other words” (Dietmar Elger, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Landscapes, Ostfildern-Ruit 1998, p. 21). This mist-enshrouded frozen seascape emanates luminescent without betraying a specific source or direction of light, resulting in a hypnotic twilight. Dramatic films of turquoise and soft greys in delicate sfumato glow in a hazy half-light, capturing a transient moment – a dream. When speaking of why he chose to paint landscapes, Richter pronounced: “I felt like painting something beautiful” (ibid., p. 12). 

Although Ru ware is very distinctive, it still shows great variation in its glazing, which can range from a pale milky-opaque green without any crackle to the intense, glassy blue-green with a light-catching crackle in superimposed, horizontal, flake-like layers seen in the present work. Known as ‘ice’ or ‘broken ice crackle,’ this variation of refracted light across the ware’s surface recalls the great fissures and shards of ice seen in Richter’s Eisberg. This movement is mercilessly precise in its making, yet is uninterested in the illusion of cause and effect. Glaze crazing, originally an undesired effect of the different contraction of body and glaze during the cooling process, was first discovered as an asset on Ru ware; yet an attractive crackle pattern refracting the light, like the spontaneous patterning of ice crystals, requires a happy coincidence of circumstances and cannot be produced at will. Passing a transient moment through a mechanical photographic document before translating to canvas, the frozen landscape of Eisberg is resigned to the past, “as beautiful as their natural subjects and beautiful as painted artefacts, but they withhold any invitation to empathy” (Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, New York 2002, p. 53). 

Sotheby's is honoured to present these outstanding works generously on loan from the collection of the Long Museum.