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The work by Antoni Cumella (Granollers, 1913-1985) is characterised by an ongoing exploration of the forms and textures of ceramic volumes. Following along the lines of Llorens Artigas with the renewal of the language of ceramics, Cumella’s pieces break free of its decorative nature and become fully-fledged sculptures. Cumella never approached ceramics as an applied art, but as an exploration of the material and three-dimensional forms in space. He reached creative maturity in the fifties, and in 1953 he began to create ceramic plaques and reliefs, which eventually led to his large volumes and architectural interventions.

Cumella introduced Oriental high-temperature firing techniques (as Llorens Artigas had done before him) to his work with glazed stoneware – his material of choice due to its malleability – in order to achieve a quality that allowed him to dispense with all decorative elements and focus on exploring the material. This approach allowed Cumella to carry out the work that interested him: research on the spatial aspects and pictorial qualities of the material.
Cumella’s work contains a wide variety of forms: ovoids, spheres, bells, cylinders and cones, of different thickness and widths, which play mostly with rotation, but also include a great wealth of tones and subtleties of colour. Cumella chooses monochromes that are rich in nuances, gradations and granularity. With his architectural approach to ceramics, the artist offered a contemporary take on the glazed stoneware volume, and endowed it with the status of artistic object.