Contemporary Fired Ceramic Sculptural Lamp by Tonino Negri

TONINO NEGRI ( b.1961)
Fired ceramic sculptural table lamp
Hand crafted using the coiling technique and fired at 2190 degrees Farenheit
Signed and dated. Italy 2009
Rewired for use in the US with one standard base bulb
20 H x 11.5 W x 11 D

TONINO NEGRI
For nearly 40 years, sculptor and ceramicist Tonino Negri has tested the poetic possibilities and narrative potential of clay in work that explores and stretches the material's very nature. Born in Lodi, Lombardy in 1961, Negri was raised in the region's rich tradition of ceramic art. After training in the 1980s with master craftsman Marcello Chiarenza, whose practice lives at the intersection of sculpture, design, and theater, Negri studied indigenous craft production in South America, particularly in the Amazon basin. Returning to his birthplace, he founded the Terra Crea (Earth Creates) workshop in 1993, an essential testing ground and laboratory. Anchored in the ancestral histories of ceramic-making and the painstaking methodology of his craft, Negri's creations expand the definition of a primal medium. Using both the wheel and the coil technique, Negri offers his own poetic vision of the most archetypal forms in clay- the water bearer, the ark, the animal world. In recent years he has turned his attention towards both the use of internal light to further elaborate on his ceramic forms, and an engagement with glazes, combining fire and mineral to echo the delicate and muted tones he sees in nature, each effort resulting in unique chromatic shades, impossible to perfectly reproduce a second time. His work escapes the limits of utility, culminating in dream-like visions: birds in starry firmaments; eggs nestled on pillows; tiny arks with pregnant bellies resting on craggy mountaintops, bearing the viewer to a new, more hopeful world seeded from the remnants of the old. Preoccupied with the synergies of earth, fire, water, and air — primordial elements which together form all new materials— Negri's production centers on what he calls the "miracle of creation, which must remind us of our origins and our story." Paring down his material to its purest yet most poetic form, Negri creates vessels for our dreams and our stories, linking us to all that came before.