Exotic figures under palm trees, in distant lands where the sky is cream and pink, dandy hares and swanky felines draped in exquisite cobalt blue and alladin-yellow textiles, bebooted swirling creatures whose light refracts from glazed surfaces silver and reddish gold gleams, pearl grey and indigo lacquer, mint, emperor, and myrtle green, animals petting humans, dancing lepidoptera sucking pollen.

Ana Botezatu’s glazed ceramic works range from utilitarian objects—vases, cups, plates, candleholders, tiles—to whimsical figures, and abstract sculptures. Drawing from sources as varied as Persian and Greek mythology, children’s books from her native Romania, Georgia O’ Keefe’s and the Bloomsbury Group’s recipe books, and cartoons, she is primarily interested in intimacy and private life. In a conversation with Mihaela Chiriac on her exhibition “A Pile of Anxieties” at Stations, Berlin, she remarks: “When I first read Marcel Duchamp’s interviews years ago, it was so fitting to what I felt. Duchamp was talking with great ease about art as part of daily life…For me there is no essential difference between so-called high art and folk art, they both come from the same place.”

Ana Botezatu (*1982, Brașov, Romania) works at the intersection of ceramics, book illustration, set design, textiles, puppet theatre, object design, and ethnographic research. She studied ceramics at the Art and Design University Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is currently in the two-person exhibition “Marieta Chirulescu & Ana Botezatu: Private Life”, at the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw. She lives in Berlin.