Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto

In partnership with CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art, Denmark and Kunstsilo, Norway, The Hepworth Wakefield will bring Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto to the UK in November 2025.

The artist and author Edmund de Waal (b.1954, Nottingham) has curated the first major exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto (1889 – 1961), considered one of the greatest masters of 20th-century ceramic art. Salto was a radical polymathic figure who crossed boundaries from one discipline to another, producing an extraordinary body of ceramic work alongside paintings, wood- cuts, drawings, book illustration and textiles.

After studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where he became intrigued by modernism and a progressive aesthetic, Salto travelled to Paris, where he met Picasso and Matisse. An accomplished poet and author, he founded the influential Danish art journal Klingen (The Blade), an important forum for critical thinking in Denmark. Salto is internationally renowned for his highly individual and expressive stoneware inspired by organic forms, characterised by budding, sprouting and fluted surface textures that appear to ripple and burst with life.

Salto’s ceramics will be shown alongside lesser-known and unseen works on paper, illustrations, writings and textiles, with a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence.