尚吉雷 ｜ Jean Girel

唯一在世的法国国家级工艺美术大师、获艺术与文化骑士勋章的陶瓷大师

尚吉雷 Jean Girel，法国陶瓷艺术大师1947年出生于法国的萨瓦省，在巴黎获视觉艺术学位，是获艺术与文化骑士勋章的陶瓷大师。国家级工艺美术大师、也是唯一在世的法国国家级工艺美术大师。在他14岁之时跟随法国乡村的一位陶艺家学徒，在陶瓷艺术创作上，有独特的方式，在梅肯高等美术学院学习并获得巴黎美术学士学位，他以画家的眼光审视自己的作品，在创作品应用大量的生活素材，对于釉料的把握与使用，对于周边的事物、动物、自然界的变化，分析其原理，将其应用于日常的创作中。其作品分别被日本大阪市立东洋陶瓷美术馆、台北故宮博物院、北京故宮博物院等博物馆永久收藏。

Each of French master ceramist Jean Girel’s artworks ends up a surprise, he has said, and stirs in him a renewed urge to create. Once a painter, he has never stopped casting a painter’s critical eye to his own work - he builds, rebuilds, and even changes his kilns on a constant basis. 

Jean Girel was born in 1947, in Savoie, France.  He read for a visual arts degree in Paris and is the only ceramist member of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. 

Though he was apprenticed with a traditional potter by at the tender age of 14, he did not immediately take up a career in ceramics. Instead, he studied Fine Arts in Macon and then visual arts in Paris, after which he became a painter. And he would perhaps have remained one, had it not been a chance encounter with a Song-Dynasty Jian bowl at the Musée Guimet in 1975. 

It was at the Guimet that Girel would first come into contact with the Jian bowl that would come to change the course of his life. He joked, in 2015, at a tenmoku exhibition in Taiwan, that he and his wife had “met in twelfth-century China”. 

Girel decided in 1975 that he would dedicate himself to ceramic art. His work is highly creative and individualistic - he incorporates, and is inspired by his observations of natural phenomena, his environment, and his unparalleled artistic imagination. There is even an element of whimsy to some of his work, signs of a master artist at play: the mischievous addition of small woodland creatures to his designs, or an impromptu painting of the view outside his workshop to a ceramic piece. 

For his Jian pieces, Girel cites his Song Dynasty predecessors as a major influence, but also draws a certain animus from nature. The blue hues of cooling lava from an erupting volcano in Africa inspired the addition of water into his glazes and a temperature adjustment that is in part responsible for the signature iridescence of his pieces.

Girel’s work is exhibited across the world. He is well-acquainted with not just the history, philosophies, and creation of his first love - Jian ware - but also with celadon and jizhou ware. As such, he has written prolifically on ceramics. His works include 2004’s The Potter’s Wisdom, a psychohistory of, and meditation on the art of pottery, as well as 2014’s A Brief History of Ceramics and Song Ceramics and the Art of the Five Elements. 

Girel is, first and foremost, a painter, and it is with the trained eye of a painter that he regards the world and his surroundings. It is that same keenness of eye and shrewd artistic sensibility that allows him to create as he does. His forty-year journey is not yet at its close.

Girel’s work has been collected by the British Museum, the Taipei Palace Museum, the Beijing Palace Museum, the Osaka Museum of Oriental Ceramics, and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.