Sharing a whole – Bernd Röter’s ceramics collection
Presse Basel Live
An estate preserves what remains
– a collection makes visible what should be remembered.
Christmas sale:
Over 160 handmade ceramics
presented for the first time!
Works of:
Jan Bontjes van Beek (1899-1969)
Volker Ellwanger (1933)
Dieter Crumbiegel (1938)
Horst Kerstan (1941-2005)
Bernd Röter (1943-2023)
and others
Curated by Cyril Kazis,
Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols
Vernissage
Saturday, 6. December 2025, 16.00 – 19.00
Exhibition:
12, 13. 14. December 2025 13:00 – 18:00
19, 20. 21. December 2025 13:00 – 18:00
Finissage
Wednesday, 24. December 2025, 11.00 – 16.00
The ceramics gathered here come from Bernd Röter’s personal collection, created between the 1960s and the 1980s.
They are handmade, unique pieces, created from everyday work in the pottery workshops in West Berlin and Sögel (Lower Saxony). His great artistic attitude arose from an interest in the material, in the possibilities of the raw material and, above all, from a love of earth, colour and fire.
Röter belonged to a generation of ceramists who understood craftsmanship as the basis for individual artistic expression. His work is rooted in the tradition of studio pottery, which gained importance in the post-war decades: everyday objects were re-examined, and bowls and jugs became objects of quiet concentration. In a time of industrial upheaval, Röter focused on the unique – on the trace of the hand in the material.
Other ceramicists are also represented, including Kerstan, Knaepper, Ellwanger and Crumbiegel.
This exhibition is also a transformation: the collection is opening up from the past and passing into many hands. The pieces will not remain in storage, but can be purchased – deliberately at prices that allow many people to own a piece of this life’s work. In this way, the spirit of the collection remains alive: not in the possession of a connoisseur of its time, but in shared use, passed on to other lovers of the material.
In the end, what remains is not loss, but transformation: it is the present, passed on, used and appreciated.