Karima DUCHAMP is a ceramic artist and painter born in France to Algerian parents.
I have always been inspired by all the Berber objects and traditions that were around me from childhood. The unconscious and profound links with my great grandmother potter Algerian and my mother who used to weave tapestries are the core of me being an artist. I feel like I'm passing on women's stories.
I am interested in reclaiming traditional influences and how this adapts to the current Craft without bending to western influences, taking time to encounter other communities to understand how we can learn from the specificities and the richness of each tradition.
With clay, on paper or on canvas, I manipulate, let go, break away from an academic practice of sculpture and drawing, giving color a real role, modeling it as I model clay.
My work develops from surfaces, by superimposing layers, by twisting the material, by constructing and deconstructing. From states of reverie, I deploy more or less tangible figures, shapes and spaces that lift us up or separate us, interested in the overlaps or intersections that exist between people and forms.
My voluntarily slow creative and dreamlike ritual allows me to immerse myself in the physical and psychic depths of which the spiritual and mystical elements belong to my practice.
Through my personal history, I draw my inspiration from historical frescoes, ornamentation and vernacular architecture. In a reduction of shapes, games of transparencies, feelings and sensations, I seek to get to the essential. This outline is motivated by a sensitivity to the passage of time in a form of contemplation and nostalgia, offering a particular language for reading and imagining the world."
She graduated with a M.F.A with Honors from l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Besançon and an additional one year ceramic diploma. Since then, she has followed her artistic explorations through residencies: in the United States, twice in Japan and in Germany.
Her work have won numerous awards and have been included in many individual and collective exhibitions around the world such as Paris Design Week, Collectible in Brussels, The Salon Art + Design in New York, Art Basel Design Miami and Art Basel Design Basel and regularly with Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia. Her artworks belong to private and public collections such as Ariana Museum in Geneva, Grottaglie Museum in Italy (acquisition in 2023), Siegburg Museum in Germany (acquisition in 2022), and Yingge Museum in Taipei.
