Karima Duchamp is a ceramic artist and a painter based in France. Her practice incorporates ceramics, paintings, drawings which she often combines. Her highly refined and yet particular sense of materiality, combined with an elegant sense of atmosphere, contribute to her enveloping and resonant artwork.
Duchamp received her MFA with Honors from Institut Supérieur Des Beaux Arts (Besançon, France). Her work has won multiple awards including 1st Prize at the 30th Concorso di Ceramica Contemporanea “Mediterraneo” at Museo della Ceramica di Grottaglie (Italy) in 2023, the Siegburger Keramikpreis (Germany) in 2022, and 1st Prize at Internationale Keramiktage Oldenburg (Germany) in 2014, allowing her to be invited as a guest artist at The Clay Studio (Philadelphia).
Duchamp’s work has also been included in numerous solo and group shows across the world including at Paris Design Week, Collectible (Brussels), Salon Art + Design (New York), Art Basel (Switzerland), Design Miami, and Moderne Gallery (Philadelphia).
Her work is featured in public collections including Musée Ariana (Geneva), Stadtmuseum Siegburg (Germany), New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum (Taiwan), The Clay Studio (Philadelphia), and Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan). As a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, she continues her ceramic explorations through artistic residencies worldwide.
Artist Statement
Duchamp builds up thin slabs of clay in geometric shapes and often paints alluring silhouettes and landscapes that evoke emotion on the surfaces. Her practice is an investigation of pictorial expressive gestures. Her work explores the irregularities and imperfections of the process, the traces and the tensions that reveal inconsistencies in the spaces and confer to the works a human element like in old, decayed walls. Clay allows her to tell the passage of time, a meditative and poetic space where the story of her memories is expressed using precarious and fragile forms.
Her universe is a fascinating dialogue and a reflection on the human and the emotional potential of vulnerability, fragmentation, and intimacy through the exploration of the duality between weakness and strength. The ideas of this seemingly oppositional dialectic running through her works, as other notions like abstract and figurative, mechanical, and organic, traditional, and forward-looking, constantly mirror each other. They find expression in vibrantly colored sculptures and large-scale paintings that often develop from essential aspects of clay and paint such as material composition, a process that strives to give meaning to time sedimented in a reduction of means.