Julia Kunin

Kunin's practice is guided by an expansive curiosity and a spirit of experimentation, moving fluidly between art history, mythology, sexuality, and cultural history. Her sculptural forms emerge through a process of discovery and free association, where references to the body, architecture, and the decorative arts give way to unexpected connections and conceptual detours.

For nearly two decades, Kunin has worked within an artistic community in Pécs, Hungary, developing a deep engagement with ceramic traditions and techniques. Her intuitive approach to making is balanced by rigorous research, reflecting an enduring fascination with the relationships between material, history, and imagination.

Writing in Art in America, critic and curator Glenn Adamson observes, “Kunin adopts these stereotypes only to liberate them.” Through fragmented figures and symbolic forms, Kunin reimagines inherited representations of femininity, transforming them into expressions of desire, transformation, and self-determination.

Julia Kunin

Conversing in Clay: Ceramics from the LACMA Collection

LACMA, Los Angeles, CA, 2022-23

One of the earliest and best-preserved areas of artistic production across the globe, ceramics remain a vital field of expression and experimentation into the present. Conversing in Clay: Ceramics from the LACMA Collection explores the medium through 14 case studies, placing historical works in visual dialogue with contemporary examples to illuminate symbolic meanings, technical achievements, and resonances throughout time. The exhibition examines how artists working today relate to international artistic traditions of the medium, both through deliberate references to the past and by engaging with aspects of clay’s materiality that have inspired makers over the centuries. Drawing from LACMA’s wide-ranging collections, the exhibition also highlights many recent contemporary acquisitions, including works by Nicholas Galanin, Steven Young Lee, Courtney Leonard, Roberto Lugo, Mineo Mizuno, Elyse Pignolet, Paul Scott, and more.

In "Indigo Garden," Julia Kunin evokes amphibious environments with slip-cast rocks and snails submerged in pooled, iridescent glaze. She has long been inspired by the macabre tradition of casting once-living specimens pioneered by French Renaissance polymath Bernard Palissy and widely elaborated over the centuries. For this body of work, she was also entranced by images of the historical iridescent ceramics produced by the internationally acclaimed Zsolnay ceramics manufactory in Hungary. While the firm guards the recipes of its materials, the Brooklyn-based artist gained permission to produce work in the factory. Her richly textured surfaces intensify the scintillating effects of Zsolnay’s eosin glaze.