Why “Ugly” Ceramics Are So Appealing

“People want to touch it,” Thomas Kelly, director at Sean Kelly Gallery in Los Angeles, told Artsy, describing Brian Rochefort’s Falcon (2025)—one of three sculptures prominently featured in the gallery’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles in February. This visceral ceramic work is a riot of erupting textures and cracked glazes in lavender, teal, and rust, calling to mind an alien terrain. It’s typical of Rochefort’s practice, which encompasses sculptures and vessels that Kelly said feel “like they’re living, breathing.”.

Rochefort’s work reflects a wider aesthetic trend: deformed and unpolished ceramics that ooze, rupture, and revel in disorder. These works, which could be described—admiringly or not—as “ugly,” lean deliberately into what clay vessels have historically avoided: collapse, asymmetry, and excess. While their rough edges feel like a reaction to the slickness of much contemporary minimalist design, they aren’t entirely novel. “Ugly” ceramics do, however, speak to a notably of-the-moment desire to subvert history and welcome imperfection.

The experimental underpinnings of today’s “ugly” ceramics can be traced back over a century. In Mississippi in the 1890s, George Ohr, the self-proclaimed “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” twisted and pinched his vessels into wild forms that defied convention. By the mid-20th century, Peter Voulkos was pushing the medium even further, tearing open pottery and channeling the energy of Abstract Expressionism into slabs, gashes, and stacked forms.

That unruly energy is carried forward by contemporary ceramicists like Kathy Butterly, known for her crumpled porcelain works, and Takuro Kuwata, whose innovative glaze techniques produce exploding forms. Such artists are visible in both commercial and institutional settings. For instance, Kuwata was the subject of a recent solo show at Salon 94 in New York. Shozo Michikawa’s hulking, abrasive clay forms took the shape of a teapot exhibited by Loewe at this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, and Masaomi Yasunaga’s cracked, lumpy vessels were on view in Lisson Gallery’s Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 booth. Meanwhile, “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie,” on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 17th, features Yeesookyung’s glittering, malformed assemblages, pieced together from broken porcelain using kintsugi (a Japanese method of repairing pottery with gold).

These works make a clear counterpoint to the restraint exhibited by some contemporary ceramicists like Ron Nagle and Ken Price, whose comparatively streamlined forms have shaped a market for sleek, colorful ceramics. Instead, today’s “ugly” ceramics provoke discomfort—which, for many collectors, is precisely the point. In an era of curated surfaces and algorithmic smoothness, these fractured, unstable forms feel more emotionally direct.

“The grotesque speaks to the human condition; it’s more honest,” said art advisor Rebecca Ryba. “Everything’s so false, and we’re living in a world of narcissism, vanity, filters, and bullshit, and it’s not real. And so there’s a pull towards realness. The grotesque, the ugly, and the deformed are quite beautiful, and some of my clients see that, too.”

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” That oft-cited aphorism, attributed to Pablo Picasso, captures the spirit of many contemporary ceramists who are trained in classical techniques but intentionally deviate from them. The choice to make work that slumps and ruptures is often about shifting the terms of beauty itself.

Ideals of simplicity, precision, and flawlessness in ceramics are rooted in centuries of East Asian traditions, including the elegant stoneware of the Song dynasty in China and the technically advanced celadon ceramics of Korea’s Goryeo dynasty. These traditions have influenced the minimalist aesthetic popular in ceramics today. But many artists choose to push in the opposite direction. For instance, Korean American artist Steven Young Lee, who is trained in traditional porcelain techniques, creates works that appear to explode or sag mid-firing. “Intentionally deconstructing vessels recalibrates notions of classical perfection and beauty and seeks to critique ideas of failure and expectation, craft skill, and the innate value of an object,” he said in an artist statement.

At the Met, “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie” traces how 18th-century Europe’s obsession with imported Chinese porcelain—and its imitation through chinoiserie—shaped enduring fantasies about femininity and race. Porcelain’s fragility became a metaphor for women: prized, decorative, and easily broken. In response, contemporary Asian and Asian American women, including Yeesookyung, reclaim the medium to recast porcelain’s loaded history through a feminist lens. In her “translated vases,” the Korean artist fuses broken shards of porcelain into bulbous, gold-laced sculptures that reject the dainty perfection once fetishized by the West, instead embracing rupture and recomposition as forms of strength and beauty.

Other artists are motivated by a desire to bring historical traditions into conversation with contemporary motifs and ideas. That impulse is present in the work of German artist Sarah Pschorn. Her vessels are inspired by the opulence of Baroque design, particularly porcelain produced by Meissen—a manufacturer established in Germany in 1710, known for ornamental designs influenced by East Asian ceramics. Pschorn’s “Copy and Paste” series channels this historical predecessor, but uses deformed surfaces, found objects, and technology like 3D printing to update the forms while referencing contemporary themes like digital culture and wellness.“There is the artist’s desire for creative freedom—to push the limits of the material and challenge traditional forms,” said Laetitia Gorsy, the Leipzig, Germany-based gallerist who represents Pschorn.

While much of this “ugly” work may appear clumsily constructed, these artists’ aesthetic choices should not be interpreted as a lack of technical sophistication. Beneath the sensory overload of Brian Rochefort’s work, for example, is a rigorous understanding of the material. “It’s freedom in the form,” said Kelly. “His use of color, his understanding of different techniques, the way he incorporates pieces that might fall off in the firing process and puts them back into the sculpture.…We were incredibly drawn to the work and saw where it could go.”

In an era defined by mass production and high-tech precision, handmade ceramics offer something increasingly rare: evidence of the maker’s touch. Cracks, fingerprints, and uneven glaze—qualities some might consider flaws—are now seen as markers of authenticity.

German artist Johannes Nagel works exclusively with porcelain, one of the most unforgiving ceramic materials. His process is both methodical and unruly: He creates molds out of compacted sand, which he fills with liquid clay to cast his vessels. This process is highly irregular, sometimes producing massive holes and breakages in the final products. Some works, such as White Twist (2018), appear weather-beaten, with unpolished surfaces pocked with holes and fingerprints. “Sometimes, these pieces accumulate character and a beauty that grows from the struggle rather than immediate serendipity,” Nagel told Artsy. “My intention is not the perfection of the ultimate expression; it is to articulate a concept of the evolution of things.” For collectors, he added, that visible struggle becomes a metaphor for life.

This resistance to replication lies at the heart of many artists’ motivations. “Grotesque ceramics, in particular, cannot be replicated by molds. It is the artist’s hand that speaks to us directly,” Gorsy told Artsy. She views ceramics made in this style as a powerful counterpoint to “contemporary issues, particularly AI, automation, and digitalization.”

For Japanese artist Shozo Michikawa, this ethos marks a direct departure from his own professional history. After years of working in a ceramic factory, he abandoned industrial production to develop a technique of twisting dense clay on a wheel, creating forms resembling burnt wood, cracked stone, or geological fault lines. ​​Michikawa’s practice reflects his reverence for nature and its dominance over humans, a viewpoint at odds with the very nature of industry.

“Perfection of form and execution is not something that is tantamount to success, necessarily,” said Juliet Burrows, co-founder of New York gallery Hostler Burrows, which frequently works with Michikawa. “Something that shows that someone was struggling or was imparting something about their daily ritual, their daily thoughts and ideas—you can feel that in the clay.”

For Hollywood producer and art collector Michael Sherman, the appeal of Rochefort’s work was immediate. “It looked like a colorful volcano, an eruption of clay,” he said, telling Artsy that after encountering the work for the first time at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, he felt magnetized by it. “I don’t necessarily think a ceramic has to be as perfect as a painting when it’s finished,” he added. “That’s the beauty of it—this magnanimous overflow.”

He’s not alone. As collectors seek out pieces that feel more tactile and expressive, “ugly” ceramics are finding audiences, encouraged by gallerists and art advisors. “A collection becomes more interesting if you add more dimensions to it,” said Geer Pouls, founder of the craft-forward German gallery Brutto Gusto. “In my advising work, I try to convince my clients to challenge their collection to make it more vivid and to bring some tension to it: in forms, in dimensions, in material, in contents, and so on, so that the works can communicate with each other.”