Michael Flynn

The Spectacle of Life

8 July – 7 September 2017

Opening Saturday, 8 July, 2017 from 6 p.m., with the artist’s presence

Ceramic artist and sculptor Michael Flynn is the Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste’s 2017 summer guest. His works are displayed in over forty museums throughout the world, among which the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, The Musée Ariana in Geneva, and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York. An Irishman born in 1947 in Wuppertal, Germany, Michael Flynn lives and works in Cardiff (Britain).

For this exhibition, the Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste has gathered an array of sculptures that is very representative of the themes tackled by the artist in the course of the 2000s. This collection is enriched by recent work specially created for the exhibition.

• A publication has been issued on the occasion of the exhibition.
• Biography
• Michael Flynn Press Release

Since the start of his career, Michael Flynn has excelled in subtle figuration, and has never ceased to explore it even though abstraction and design were the leading tendencies of ceramic sculpture for a good twenty years. He attempts all experiences that ceramics offers and navigates effortlessly between its different materials, techniques and firings. Applying them to his favourite subjects, he puts everything back into play every single time, to see if he can get even nearer to the essence of his thought.

Isabelle Naef Galuba, director of the Musée Ariana, Geneva, extract from the exhibit catalogue.

This idea of a “spectacle of life” is at the very heart of the artist’s conception of the exhibition organised at the Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste in Toucy. For the occasion, Michael Flynn has selected twenty-one ceramic sculptures, which include both new creations and some earlier pieces produced in the last fifteen years. That combination highlights the artist’s evolution as well as the overall coherence of a living and inhabited œuvre.

Guillaume Morel, journalist & art critic, extract from the exhibit catalogue.

Through form, movement and space, Flynn expresses sensuality and spirit. He pushes the expressive limits of the malleable material that is clay, thus bringing a personal contribution to contemporary figurative sculpture.

Frank Nievergelt, A Passion for Ceramics – Catalogue of the Frank Nievergelt Collection exhibition, Musée Ariana, Geneva, 2016.