Nina Malo: Ceramic Sculpture is on view at Galerie Marianne Brand, Carouge, Geneva
September 4-21, 2025
Galerie Marianne Brand is delighted to present the second solo exhibition of Nina Malo, following her debut with the gallery in 2020. Malo’s work in contemporary ceramics explores a sculptural language of balance and tension: forms stretched with clarity, surfaces refined to a tactile softness, and volumes that embody both material sensitivity and quiet strength.
The exhibition is presented at Galerie Marianne Brand, 20 Rue Ancienne, Carouge, Geneva, within the framework of Art Week Geneva, from September 17 to 21.
A graduate of HEAD in jewelry and object design, Nina Malo (Nina Mathèz-Loïc) discovered ceramics in 2017 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she, as a permanent resident, spends several months each year working, alongside her regular practice in Geneva. Passionate about this material, she builds her pieces from a sketch, but also by allowing her hands the freedom to gradually shape a form out of coils, whether it be volumes or flattened ribbons of clay, if she envisions a finer curve.
Malo’s preferred medium is porcelain stoneware whose texture—fine and subtly colored—allows her to leave some pieces entirely white after the biscuit firing, but she also works a lot with Raku clay. She never glaze her sculptures but rather tints them by smoking them for a second firing, to which she adds oxides and various natural substances that produce coloration when burned.
The pieces are polished with meticulous care, both before and after the first firing, giving them an extreme softness to the touch and refining their structure.
Some, of smaller dimensions, take the form of a perfect oloid, extremely difficult to achieve: it consists of joining two spheres, each passing through the center of the other, which allows them to turn endlessly like a propeller once set in motion. Others fit in the palm like a smooth stone to caress; still others, larger in scale, evoke an arch, an African mask, a sacred object, or a seashell abandoned by the sea. All require constant attention during shaping, as they test the balance of forms and defy the laws of gravity.
A Language of Form
The whole falls into a subtle dialogue between curves and edges, gentleness and strength. The circle, the curve, the spiral, the Möbius strip are the formal anchors of this work, developed with great freedom and a high demand for purity of line and surface. The tension between full and hollow, solid and void, together with the fluidity of the curves, awakens a sense of infinity in which light delicately shimmers.
“My approach is a search for infinite movement, for the illusion of perpetuity,” she explains. This intention is perfectly expressed through these large hollowed ovals, polished and lustrous, which inevitably recall the sculptures of Henry Moore.
Text by Françoise Mamie
Contact
galerie-m.brand@genevalink.ch
Galerie Marianne Brand
20 rue Ancienne
1227 Carouge – Geneva
Switzerland
Photos courtesy of the gallery
