Sometimes an exhibition title finds you before you find the exhibition.
For some time now, the Grain of Design blog has carried a sentence:
We dance between worlds.
And then one Sunday afternoon, you walk into a gallery showing an exhibition called Between Worlds.
A coincidence.
But a beautiful one.
Ceramics Between Life and Decay
Between Worlds at KodlContemporary brings ceramics and alchemy together — two worlds founded on the transformation of matter.
It presents the work of Bertozzi & Casoni, Bouke de Vriese and Carolein Smit, and follows ceramics far beyond the boundaries of traditional craft: as a medium capable of speaking about beauty, death, folklore, the present, destruction and rebirth.
And transformation is everywhere here.
Porcelain is no longer a plate.
A vase stops being only a vase.
A broken dinner service is not waste.
Material refuses to remain what it was.
Between Worlds · KodlContemporary, Prague · 2026
Photo: Grain of Design
The Beauty of Destruction
The works that affected me most were the ones in which familiar objects began to behave in completely different ways.
A pile of plates, food leftovers, plastic spoons, pills, coffee — and an owl on top, looking as though it had just been the last to leave a very long party.
Elsewhere, broken porcelain becomes an exploding flower, fragments of tableware become a new organism, and an ordinary shard is given another life.
Bouke de Vries, originally a ceramic restorer, works with the beautiful principle of “beauty of destruction”. He does not repair broken objects so that their past disappears. Instead, he uses their destruction as the beginning of a new story.
Perhaps that is exactly why his work is so compelling.
Imperfection is not a mistake to hide.
It is material.
Beautiful, Strange, Slightly Unsettling
Carolein Smit builds a world somewhere between mythology, a medieval bestiary and a dream that began to go slightly wrong just before waking.
Beauty mixes with grotesque forms. The animals feel familiar, but never entirely safe. Flowers grow from shapes that suggest bodies, bones or peculiar relics.
Her work explores fragility, decay and transience, deliberately allowing the sublime to meet the ominous.
And then there is the pink octopus transformed into a vase.
With irises, of course.
Because why not.
A Gallery That Lets the City In
A large part of the experience is created by KodlContemporary itself.
Practically nothing separates you from the street but glass.
The artworks stand opposite trees, the river, passing cars and people on the pavement. The interior does not end at a wall — the city continues behind each work and changes its background throughout the day.
Yesterday, the sky was a sharp blue and the light was beautiful.
Inside, almost absolute calm.
Prague outside.
Strange ceramic organisms inside.
And only a few millimetres of glass between them.
Between Worlds
In the end, the exhibition is not only about ceramics.
It is about that moment between.
Between beauty and decay.
Between object and sculpture.
Between waste and material.
Between life and its trace.
Perhaps that is why it felt so close to me.
Design and art are often most interesting precisely when we stop knowing exactly which drawer to put them in.
And sometimes we simply dance between worlds for a while.
Where
Between Worlds
KodlContemporary
Pařížská 30, Prague 1
4 September — 1 November 2026
The exhibition presents Bertozzi & Casoni, Bouke de Vriese and Carolein Smit.
Admission free.