Bouke de Vries acquired by the British Museum
We are thrilled to announce that the British Museum has acquired a significant ceramic work by Bouke de Vries. His extraordinary “Memory Vessel: Portland Vase” (2023), a poignant deconstruction and reimagining of Wedgwood’s iconic Portland Vase, is now on permanent display in Room 47 of the museum.
In a beautifully poetic full-circle moment, de Vries’ contemporary masterpiece is exhibited alongside one of the original 18th-century Wedgwood Portland vases, as well as a stunning interpretation by fellow ceramic artist Hitomi Hosono.
For de Vries, the acquisition represents a deeply personal and professional milestone. “I have always loved the Portland vase because of its beauty but also its history,” the artist shares. That history includes a dramatic chapter in 1845, when a student, following a week of heavy drinking, smashed the original Roman glass Portland Vase into pieces.
The vase underwent multiple restorations over the next century. Its final, definitive conservation took place in the 1980s, meticulously executed by Nigel Williams and Sandra Smith. Both Williams and Smith later served as de Vries’ assessors when he studied ceramic conservation at West Dean College, a background that heavily informs his artistic practice today. Following Williams’ untimely passing, de Vries even helped establish the Nigel Williams Memorial Prize for ceramic conservation and famously persuaded Wedgwood to create a special version of the Portland Vase.
To have his own “Memory Vessel” sit in the same institution as the historic artifact that inspired it, and alongside an original Wedgwood piece, is an incredible achievement.
We congratulate Bouke de Vries on this prestigious museum acquisition, which beautifully cements his legacy at the intersection of contemporary art and historic conservation.
ABOUT Bouke de Vries
Bouke de Vries (1960) was born in Utrecht, NL
He lives and works in London, UK
Bouke de Vries studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven, and Central St Martin’s, London. After working with John Galliano, Stephen Jones and Zandra Rhodes, he switched careers and studied ceramics conservation and restoration at West Dean College. Every day in his practice as a private conservator he was faced with issues and contradictions around perfection and worth: “The Venus de Milo’ is venerated despite losing her arms, but when a Meissen muse loses a finger she is rendered virtually worthless.”
Using his skills as a restorer (c.f. Ron Mueck’s model-maker skills), his ‘exploded’ artworks reclaim broken pots after their accidental trauma. He has called it ‘the beauty of destruction’. Instead of reconstructing them, he deconstructs them. Instead of hiding the evidence of this most dramatic episode in the life of a ceramic object, he emphasises their new status, instilling new virtues, new values, and moving their stories forward.
The more contemplative works echo the 17th- and 18th-century still-life paintings of his Dutch heritage, especially the flower paintings of the Golden Age, a tradition in which his hometown of Utrecht was steeped (de Heem, van Alst, van Huysum inter alia), with their implied decay. By incorporating contemporary items a new vocabulary of symbolism evolves.
These ‘dead natures’ – natures morts – give everyday household objects, a plate, a milk jug, a teapot, a modern poignancy that refers back to the vanitas and memento mori paintings of that period. An installation in de Vries’s London house is arranged in the manner of Daniel Marot with white Delft domestic pottery rescued in fragments from 17th- and 18th-century rubbish tips, now dug up and partially pieced together. Among them are two small artists’ paint pots with the pigment still in them, as possibly once used by – who knows? – Vermeer or Rembrandt.
