Imre Schrammel’s vast oeuvre is a continuous, tormented, questioning, and never-resting dialogue with the earth – with clay itself. He works with the primal matter made up of all living things that existed before, bound to it in a strange, passionate relationship. Ascetic by nature, he resembles a Gothic saint, yet he also calls to mind Antaeus, the giant of Greek mythology who remained invincible as long as he could touch his mother, the Earth. From every touch he drew new strength. For Schrammel, the act of touching the earth seems to carry almost magical significance – the act of leaving a trace.
In 1980, in Kecskemét, during a debate among Hungarian and foreign ceramic artists about what, exactly, ceramics was, he slammed a lump of wet clay to the ground, pressed his hands and feet into it, and exclaimed: “This is ceramics! The act of leaving a trace!” (The fired hand- and footprints are now held in the collection of the Kecskemét Ceramic Studio.)
The most astonishing achievement known in the history of ceramics – the seven-thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers buried in 210 BCE in China – provided the setting, in 2005, for the publication of an eight-volume bilingual series titled Workshops of World-Famous Ceramic Artists. Two volumes cover North and South America, three volumes Australia, Oceania, Africa and Asia, and three volumes Europe. In this Chinese encyclopedia of contemporary ceramics, there is only one Hungarian artist: Imre Schrammel.
Imre Schrammel is world-renowned – a revolutionary, innovator, and independent thinker. An autonomous artist who almost always goes against the canon – including today’s. An apostle, a devotee, a master and scholar of his craft: the craft of the ceramicist, the art of ceramics and porcelain.
After a war-torn, turbulent childhood and adolescence – during which he saw dead animals, dead people, bomb craters, and lived on the edge of hunger in a chaotic and threatening world – he began his studies at the Budapest College of Applied Arts. He graduated in porcelain design, completing his diploma piece twice, as the first was blown to dust in 1956 by a shell strike at the college’s Kinizsi Street workshop. He received his diploma in 1957, carrying within him the shocking, painful memory of the Revolution and its fallen on Üllői Road – images that would return much later in his work – filled with a rebellious curiosity.
In 1959, as a young assistant lecturer, he was sent as an artistic consultant to the Hollóháza Porcelain Factory with this farewell advice: “Go, my son, to Hollóháza, and change the world!” He tried. At Hollóháza he learned factory techniques, and alongside his required tasks he began to create strange, crumpled, folded porcelain figures – torn lace phantoms, faceless mist-princesses fluttering like silk. In them, surrealism flared for the first time in Schrammel’s career. Seeking new forms in harmony with porcelain’s fleeting nature, he soon exceeded the tolerance of factory management and was dismissed. He lost his first material – porcelain – for a long time and began to search for a new one. At the factory he discovered chamotte shells (the refractory shells used for firing porcelain pieces) and began to experiment with it – stepping onto a path that would lead him far.
The first signs of Schrammel Imre’s hard-won, deeply personal path were his early, powerfully expressive “earth” works: History (1967), made of chamotte, and Layers (1969), made of pyrogranite.
“You can build from clay the way the earth’s crust layers formed, the way a river carved its bed, the way cells and plants grow… that’s what I want to try,” he said. His reliefs of layered structures are independent, self-contained sculptural ideas: they feel like glimpses into the Earth’s prehistory, revealing craters, reddish-brown, grey, and black earth tones, melted and solidified, burnt, granular, rough surfaces – the spreading, cracking, layering, and piling up of lava flows. These peculiar forms, at once archaic and reminiscent of twentieth-century collages, were strikingly new and groundbreaking in the history of Hungarian ceramics.
Into the colourful, glazed ceramic world of Hungary’s most revered ceramic masters – István Gádor, Géza Gorka, and Margit Kovács – filled with metallic-shimmering bird wall plaques, crackled-glaze ornamental vessels, and folk-inspired, finely painted dancing figures – these reliefs burst in as something entirely different. That difference became truly demonstrative in a collective act: in 1969, Schrammel organized the first ceramic symposium in Siklós, where something happened after which ceramic art in Hungary could never be the same again. In the half-ruined monastery and its garden, the young participants of this first Hungarian ceramic symposium had almost nothing: no exotic materials, no arsenal of glazes, no modern kilns – but they had rebellious will and the desperation of poverty. Schrammel carried the cause with obsession: he obtained chamotte from the Zsolnay Factory in Pécs, and with bricks they built primitive kilns themselves. He confronted the question: what can an Eastern European artist do when he has nothing? Should he try to chase Western trends? In his diary, he wrote: “I came to the conclusion that if I follow the latest commanding theories, I can instantly fall in line, and within the lifespan of that theory, I might gain some attention. Being well-informed is easier than creating something unique and personal from our own soil and materials. No! I will stand on my own two feet! […] The earth is beneath my feet, like it was for prehistoric people, for the primitive cultures who created masterpieces from it!”
With a symbolic gesture, Schrammel bent down to the ground in the Siklós garden. In a pit, he pressed soft chamotte into the soil, left it to dry in the air and sun, lifted it out as a strange bowl-like form, left the earth clinging to its surface untouched, placed it in a brick kiln, then – kicking the bricks apart – doused the glowing object with water, defying every domestic canon. Together with the others, he marvelled at the rough surface, the natural “glaze” created by fused earth particles. On their meagre means, they had rediscovered raku, the ancient Japanese pottery technique.
In Imre Schrammel’s works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is as if Eastern and Western artistic sensibilities meet: the reverence for ancient things intertwines with the restless urge for exploration. As János Pilinszky wrote in 1973: “The glory of Western art lies in its having always swum with the current, that of the East in its strength to face transience.”
The history of ceramics over the centuries is largely the story of clay tamed – covered by glaze, softened by paint. Schrammel liberated clay from beneath the glaze. For him, chamotte was no longer a raw or auxiliary material but the protagonist itself – the primordial matter that he interrogated, and that answered back.
In his chamotte sculptures, tectonic forces flare alongside organic forms: chamotte spheres cracked by inner tensions and energies; a gigantic, splitting chamotte bud; a primeval bison’s head – as if it were a strange fossil, a haunting remnant of a once-living being, perhaps destroyed by humankind.
He also sought to know what happens to human-made geometric forms – the brick, the cube – if they are split spirally, echoing the double helix of DNA that underlies organic life. How do the oval chamotte archetypes – built from tubes like the veins of living bodies and spirally cut open – shift, unfold, or move? His robust Földanya (Earth Mother, 1973) seems like the association of a dividing cell and the Venus of Willendorf: an abstract-organic form, a sign of fertility and birth. Art historian Lajos Németh said of Schrammel’s chamotte works in the show TV Galériája (1974): “Schrammel is one of the most important Hungarian artists. He is in sync with the world, yet creates something new. He does not imitate. His significance is equal to that of Béla Kondor.”
Abroad, critics quickly sensed that he was doing something both distinctive and entirely original. In 1971, at the world’s most prestigious ceramic exhibition – the International Ceramics Competition in Faenza – he was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture, the Premio Ravenna. In 1974 he won the gold medal there. In both cases, only his works could travel – a remarkable feat at the time – since he himself was not permitted to leave the country. These marked the first international honours in the history of Hungarian ceramic art, and remain unparalleled achievements – and, conversely, a lasting shame for the cultural politics of the era.
Nevertheless, the Faenza awards helped make possible Schrammel’s most monumental creation and one of his masterpieces in 1976: the vast terracotta relief for the Vác Cultural Centre – the culmination and summation of his powerful “earth” works. In the building’s upper-level theatre foyer – a curved corridor flooded with light through a row of glass windows, in one of those heavy, grey public buildings typical of the period from Gödöllő to Vác – the three-metre-high, nearly twenty-metre-long relief swirls and surges with dynamic energy.
Unlike the common ceramic practice of the time, Schrammel modelled the sections of the work not on tilted stands but flat on the ground. “A ceramic relief should never be treated like a painting,” he said. “The earth is beneath us – and we have a different relationship with all that lies beneath us.”
Schrammel worked the surface of the Vác relief with the gestures of performance art. Physically too, it was an immense feat: he moved and mixed truckloads of clay entirely by hand, without the aid of modern machinery. At times he modelled with his whole body – plunging, leaning, even falling into the soft clay – sometimes pressing decayed wooden boards or strange objects into it. These impressions of real bodies and real things possess the documentary intensity of a petrified prehistoric footprint or the mark of a dog that ran across a Roman brick two thousand years ago. One can sense the sheer force with which he struck and battered the clay – the imprints seem driven by a vast impulse, organized into swirling waves, resounding like a music of strong chords, a visual Allegro barbaro. The Vác relief is a stage of passion, thundered out in drumming beats; while the Balassagyarmat Children’s Home relief (1978) emits the minor tones of nascent life. In it, the tripartite motif of the dividing cell rises from the soft undulations, surrounded by floating, swelling, surging cell forms, veins and living muscle strands in motion. The twelve-metre-long, two-and-a-half-metre-high terracotta relief had to be dismantled because of a leaking wall behind it. Its fragments lay in storage for years until their “resurrection” in 2013, when the work was returned to the wall.
The third of these monumental “earth” reliefs is the Hegyeshalom Border Station relief (1984, chamotte): the flow of cells, the pulsing of microorganisms under a microscope, the running of waters among drifting pebbles and smooth stones, or perhaps an aerial view of city traffic, even the movement of human crowds across roads and borders. Here too we see whirling rhythms and shifting forms, evoking once again the motions of nature and of life itself. If the Vác relief speaks of explosions, and the Balassagyarmat work of undulations, then the Hegyeshalom piece is the relief of currents. What will become of this strange ornament of a border station made obsolete and deserted since Hungary’s Schengen accession?
In the late 1970s Schrammel posed a new question: what would happen if a man-made geometric form were struck by a force of nature? Into a perfectly edged, beautifully simple, still-soft porcelain block he fired an air rifle. The result was astonishing – from the artificial form blossomed a natural one, flower-like; geometry was transformed into organic wonder. In doing so, Schrammel in effect enacted the passage from the “modern” to the “postmodern”: the Mondrian-like calm universality of the porcelain prism became, through the shot, singular, personal, and sensual – yet he also engaged a third, equally powerful factor in the process: the laws of matter and of nature. After the air rifle he experimented with stronger weapons; at shooting ranges, marksmen fired at Schrammel’s porcelain blocks. Among the shot forms are earth-toned ones – clay-yellow chamotte, red or smoky grey stoneware with granular surfaces – but the contrast between the pure, cool geometry and the organic, blooming wound of the bullet hole is most dramatic and startling in the snow-white, elegant porcelain. These white, shot porcelain columns stood like spirits or souls on a pebbled riverbank – elements of a memorial design made in 1976, which was to have borne the title Minden Dunába vesztett mártír emlékére (For All the Martyrs Lost in the Danube) had it been realized.
Later, Schrammel inserted small explosive charges into still-soft porcelain prisms, studying the forms born of the detonation – the bud-like, swelling fissures and openings created by inner tension. With these fired and blasted shapes he produced perhaps the strangest nonfigurative sculptures of the 1970s and 1980s: works that are sculptures and yet somehow transcend the very notion of sculpture.
In 1980, Schrammel found a dead bird in the dried, saline lakebed of Bugac. He lifted it together with the caked mud and fired it. The result was astonishing once again: on a scorched bed of earth, the gull appeared to be flying, its fragile network of bones preserved, surrounded by the feathery radiance imprinted from the feathers that had perished in the fire. Schrammel himself was shocked – even more so the mostly Western European ceramicists who witnessed the event at the Kecskemét Ceramic Studio. He immediately set out on a new path. He began collecting dead birds struck by cars on the roads – swallows, sparrows, owls – placing them in beds of chamotte or stoneware. With their outstretched, skeletal wings and the spectral traces of feathers floating around them, they became strange archaeological relics, memorials to flight, philosophical parables about the journey of all living things, about the end of that journey, and perhaps about the transformation that follows.
He would often go to the banks of the Rába River, as he had many times before, observing what happened in the mud left behind after floods – how decayed wood, broken pottery, and plastic debris drifted and settled. Out of these experiences came, from the mid-1980s onward, a series of works he called Alluvia. In the Alluvia, peculiar objects drift, float, and pile upon one another as if cast ashore by some inner flood: a body of Christ, a fish, a reliquary bust of Saint Ladislaus, a mask taken from a living woman’s face with closed eyes, impressions of medieval apostles, fragments of fabric. It is as if sunken myths, shreds of dreams and thoughts, and fleeting images of memory had crowded together into absurd, surreal compositions. Their cast form, their strange “realness,” heightens the impact. The objects of the Alluvia bend and press softly against one another, strangely deforming each other. These fascinating distortions prompted Schrammel to ask new questions – of himself and of the material.
He modelled a female figure, taking a plaster cast of the naturalistic nude, then dressing it in real fabric draped in soft folds, which he reinforced with plaster. From this he made a silicone mould, into which he pressed clay in a thin layer. The result of this complex, multi-step process – once the rubber mould was “peeled off” – was a soft, hollow clay figure. He threw its pliant body to the ground, twisting, bending, tormenting it. These “tormented” draped figures were later enriched through a unique process that no one before him had attempted: the sand-pressure technique. It was one of Schrammel’s most remarkable discoveries. He buried the soft, hollow clay figure in sand, enclosed it between boards, and struck or pressed it forcefully from the sides and from above. When removed from its sand bed, the figure, under the combined action of air pressure and the resistance of the sand, was forced into astonishing shapes – the laws of nature and matter at work once again, under the artist’s direction. This struggling, wrestling, thinking “conductor’s role,” this play with “controlled chance,” became one of Schrammel’s fundamental creative attitudes.
The Drapériás figurák (Draped Figures) series produced extraordinary works: the drapery swirls, coils, twists, and deforms with passionate intensity; the figure within bends with it, its face hiding among the folds, undulating itself. The waves of drapery become shocking and tragic in Pietà, Trianon (1988): the Madonna is a weary, sorrowful heap of fabric folds, while the body in her lap – with its twisted, drooping limbs – is a mutilated torso, a severed head, severed limbs, a severed homeland.
With the sand-pressure technique, Schrammel achieved what he had long been striving for – something he had come closest to with the bird imprints: to approach the drama of the plaster casts of the dead he had seen in Pompeii. The starting point for Schrammel’s Pompeii Figures is the naturalistically modelled clay body. The naked, soft, hollow figures – “every living body is hollow,” he says – are compressed and deformed by sand pressure; the stronger the distortion, the more powerful the impact, the more intriguing the forms. With the pliable clay figure – its softness, the way it falls to the ground, its limbs collapsing naturally – he simulates the living body, while by burying and compressing it in sand he evokes the twenty-metre-thick, rock-hard layer of ash pressing down on the dead of Pompeii. The cracks left in the clay bodies recall wounds; the firing reproduces the terrible heat, and the fused sand grains, roughness, reddish-grey discoloration, and the “burnt-into-earth” feeling complete the process.
The Pompeii Figures have a staggering impact: the bodies frozen in the convulsion of their final moment recall Egon Schiele’s distorted nudes or Francis Bacon’s writhing beings. Schrammel makes them enact the experience and the drama of death – not simply depict it. Once again, we sense that these are sculptures and yet not sculptures, and yet they are. The suffering of the material itself lives within them.
From the mid-1980s came the tragic Torsos. Their archaeological appearance – cracked, burned, corroded by fire, with fused sand grains – carries associations of time; within them the energies of once-living, once-whole bodies seem to “burn back,” as in Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo, but without its calm dignity. These torsos are wretched and fragile. Their temporal scale extends from prehistory and ancient art to the mutilated dead of world wars and terrorist attacks. One shocking example is the 1956-os emlékműterv (1956 Memorial Design, 1986): three red stoneware torsos, pierced with wounds, press together in terror. In them we can feel the fear of the unarmed demonstrators, the bullet-riddled facades, the bodies lying in makeshift graves, their haunting memory, the crushed and mutilated revolution.
In the Kapuk (Gates) series, the compressive force becomes objectified, transformed into massive blocks. The pieces recall the megaliths of Stonehenge and Newgrange, the Lion Gate of Mycenae; they echo Greek pedimental sculptures while connecting all this with the dismembered dead of the 20th and 21st centuries, with the sense of anxiety, confinement, and threat felt by modern humanity. A bright, ironic chapter in Schrammel’s passionate and tragic oeuvre is The Story of the Minotaur. […]
He creates a Minotaur without a labyrinth, freeing him from the dark: in his works, a clumsy, masked figure squints into the light, humorous and grotesque rather than frightening. Perhaps Schrammel’s Minotaur is a symbol of fertility and earth, foolishly courting mortal women, yet not without wisdom; perhaps he has no bull’s head at all, but merely wears a mask – a dancing mask for midnight moonlit rituals. Seated on an ornate throne, a jovial ruler from a never-was Golden Age, he embraces in sand-pressed, fantastically contorted poses, crouches and laments, kneels and cries to the heavens, collapses to the ground like a figure from Pompei. Who hides behind the Minotaur’s mask? Could it be that his body itself is a costume to be shed like a cloak? Who is inside? The artist himself? An ironic self-portrait? A role play on an imagined stage?
Behind the decades of clay works – terracotta, chamotte, stoneware, pyrogranite, and others – there always runs, like an underground stream, Schrammel’s knowledge of porcelain. It sometimes surfaces in the incised, shot, or exploded works, yet remains essentially dormant until 1993, when he receives an invitation to the Herend Porcelain Manufactory and begins once more to ponder the questions that porcelain might pose. He questions porcelain – and finds his answers among what may be the most beautiful living wave of masked festivity in human history: the masked figures of the Venetian Carnival. […]
In the late 1990s Schrammel again created something bold and exceptional, bringing porcelain itself to the Herend stage in the form of the Carnival Figures. He first conceived them through a series of sketches: tiny wonders, each no larger than a handspan – one a green-masked, white-frilled swirl; another a clown in gold-and-silver checkered garb; another, beneath a double-pointed gold-and-silver cap, a mysterious white face – is it still a face, or already a mask? A third stands in the pose of Gilles, Watteau’s white clown, wearing a golden mask, with colourful diamonds and flowers dancing across his costume.
After the sketches and the tuning, the larger figures are born: the violins begin to play, the ball commences, filled with strange atmospheres. Some figures are wrapped in voluminous garments – Schrammel clothes them in real silks, casting from actual textiles, one of the emblematic sculptural gestures of the twentieth century. Perhaps this lends them their peculiar undulation, as if they had no bodies and yet did, giving their movement a puppet-like, stylised quality. A mystery hovers about them: they have no faces, only masks.
Here, the mystery – we feel it – is just a play. Yet within it gleam echoes of history and art history, of masked rituals and cultic dances, the refined fragility of the Rococo, the flowing lines of Art Nouveau, and the marvel of Surrealism. Behind the Herend Carnival Figures one senses Max Ernst’s red-feathered bird-bride – but without the sinister undertone. Here she reclines lightly on a porcelain couch of white masks, while Schrammel designs black-and-gold patterns on her rich golden robe; then, in a stroke of brilliance, he has Herend motifs painted – by the Herend porcelain painters – onto the figures themselves. Herend floral designs dance across the garments and hands, climb up the golden masks, transforming the Venetian Carnival icon, known throughout Europe, into something uniquely Hungarian. In doing so, he heightens their surreal impact: placing what is familiar into a new context, using it differently yet with fidelity, almost as if in quotation marks yet with reverence – as though the Herend porcelain patterns, largely of Chinese origin but now a true Hungaricum, were shining here and now upon the carnival figures in a new light never before seen.
Among the Karneváli figurák (Carnival Figures), generally around forty centimetres tall, there are a few larger pieces – between ninety and one hundred centimetres – that count as true technical feats. Together with the master craftsmen of the Herend factory, Schrammel developed the porcelain-casting technique that made their creation possible. These larger figures were originally intended for a special café space – also conceived by Schrammel – in front of the Herend Porcelain Manufactory. One of them, the Pestisdoktor (Plague Doctor), later took the name Költő (Poet): on its white porcelain robe, Schrammel had verses from important poets of various nations and languages painted by Herend porcelain decorators. Black letters and lines of poetry dance and flicker across the white mantle, here and there an exquisitely drawn initial; above them bends the Plague Doctor’s beak-like mask, and in this black-and-white symphony there is only one patch of colour – a blue-and-yellow Herend butterfly on the Poet’s hand.
The afterlife of the Carnival Figures continued – or was meant to continue – on the walls of the National Theatre. According to the original plans, the pillar-figures conceived in pyrogranite for the exterior façade were to continue inside the building, alluding to the solemn processions of ancient rituals. Inside the foyer, their tone – matching the building’s exterior – would have gradually shifted toward colour, first taking on earthy hues. Along the double row of boxes in the theatre hall, an unconventional garland of ornamentation was to lead them toward the site of the ceremony – the stage. In the originally envisioned interior, restrained and patternless, in silver-grey tones with deep red curtains, the masked figures, upon reaching the stage, would have become porcelain – the deceptive, theatrical material itself – perhaps adorned with the surreal use of Herend motifs and golden masks that would shimmer and fade in the light. After a complete redesign of the theatre’s interior concept, this plan was never realised.
The exterior figures were partially preserved and ultimately executed in fine concrete. Their motifs refer to the ancient roots of theatrical art: from tree-of-life headdresses to stage crowns, from the comedy and tragedy masks of Greco-Roman drama to the beaked mask of the plague doctor – to the commedia dell’arte. Within their floating, draped, cast forms, one can also sense the influences of twentieth-century modernist movements.
After the Herend porcelain interlude and the sculptures of the National Theatre, Schrammel returned to his earth works, meditating on transience – on how the earth reclaims what once was alive.
The Elmúlás-sorozat (Passing Series) is a labour of mourning, a cycle of reliefs that are tormented questions and answers – phases of death and remembrance. His stoneware reliefs are at once shocking and radiate reconciliation. Among them stands a striking apocryphal image: the body of Christ seems to be returning to the earth. Such an image is unusual – it evokes not the crucified, the taken-down, or the resurrected body, but rather one disintegrating into soil. The Passing Reliefs trace the phases of decay and remembrance.
Intact body fragments still rise here and there, a surviving gesture still recalls the living; but the breaking forms are already outlined by cracks, encircled by the expectant earth. The last of them is but a mound of clods, barely suggesting what has turned to soil. Its title: Feltámadunk? (Shall We Be Resurrected?)
Thinking about death runs almost parallel to thinking about life: in the early 2000s, Schrammel began to model still lifes, swelling fruit forms. Hollow fruit bodies, casts of real fruits, are pressed together and deformed by sand pressure, held within dish-like frames – and at times, it feels as if the dish itself were Time: an imprint of an Inca calendar. The genre of still life is a peculiar one – an organic geometry, made up only of forms and rhythms, yet they are the forms of nature itself. By the end of the 2000s, Schrammel’s earlier style seems to return: he begins to model animal sculptures again. “Da capo” – says the musical notation that calls for the repetition of an important motif.
Animal representation is a recurring motif throughout Schrammel’s life: animal drawings and sculptures accompany his entire career. He has a unique talent for capturing animal character. In the 1950s, he modelled arrogant monkeys; in the late 1970s, in Siklós, he created a baboon so characterful that everyone gasped – it looked uncannily like Brezhnev. For a time, it could not even be publicly shown. From the early 1990s, using his sand-pressing technique, he made strange animal sculptures: a coiling, dying cat; a grotesquely distorted “character” of a baboon pasha. The sand-pressure method amplifies the human element already grafted into the monkey form, pushing it further toward the grotesque. Schrammel’s uncanny sense of character works flawlessly even when only skulls are involved: his cracked, rough, deformed stoneware chimpanzee and gorilla skulls precisely distinguish the two species. In 2008, he again modelled a baboon and a mountain gorilla – animals endangered by humans. Or perhaps, humans themselves?
Schrammel’s passionate dialogue with earth materials – lasting for more than half a century – continued through the 2010s with undiminished intensity. He posed new questions, experimented with new materials and firing techniques that further intensified the effect of his sand-pressed, tormented, elongated figures. One of his most desperate exaggerations, a bound, tortured, burned, rough-surfaced female figure, bears the title Magyarország az Európai Unióban (Hungary in the European Union, 2011).
Schrammel Imre’s oeuvre resists easy classification within the canons of fine art, ceramics, or sculpture. His powerful earth works may be linked to Expressionism, his porcelains to Surrealism, his free gestures even to Postmodernism.
Perhaps no one – not only in Hungary, but internationally – knows more, both practically and theoretically, about ceramics and porcelain than he does. His approach to his craft recalls the bell-casting scene in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 film Andrei Rublev. Who could say what happens there more truly: the trial of a long-studied, disciplined, rigorous craft; a work of precise technical mastery calculated to the risks of chance; or a miracle, an act of magic, some transcendent process that lifts humanity from the earth into a spiritual sphere? In Schrammel’s art, one feels the same flavour as Tarkovsky’s bell-casting.
As the Italian art historian Mario Vigna wrote of him in 1983: “In his works, Schrammel moves with complete professional assurance among the highest peaks of ceramic art.”
He still does.
(2014) The full study is available in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.