The Everson Museum of Art presents Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts, marking the American museum debut of French-born Canadian ceramist Laurent Craste. On view now through May 24, 2026, the exhibition explores porcelain’s historic role as a symbol of wealth, refinement, and power, and disrupts it.
Courtesy of the artist
Laurent Craste, Iconocraste au bat VII, 2024/25, Porcelain, glaze, and baseball bat, 40 3/4 × 33 5/16 × 14 ¾ inches
“When I hit a beautiful porcelain vase with a baseball bat, I provoke a visual shock. There is a contrast between the beauty and luxury of the objects and the violence that is submitted to. I want to make people conscious of the fragility of our world.”— Laurent Craste
Courtesy of the artist
Laurent Craste, Carcasse IX (Carcass IX), 2024/25, Porcelain, glaze, custom decals, burnished mat gold, butcher hook, and chain, 25 × 11 4/5 × 7 1/2 inches
Throughout his career, Craste has transformed meticulously crafted porcelain vessels into charged objects of confrontation. His ornate vases are pierced by arrows, crushed with baseball bats, impaled with crowbars, and struck with nail-studded bars. The resulting works stage a jarring collision between beauty and violence.
Porcelain was once more valuable than gold, coveted by European aristocracy and intertwined with systems of trade, colonization, and class hierarchy. By weaponizing this historically elite material, Craste exposes the fragility of inherited power structures, from the excesses of Marie Antoinette’s court to contemporary displays of luxury and status.
Curated in collaboration with Garth Johnson, the Everson’s Paul Phillips and Sharon Sullivan Curator of Ceramics, Iconoclasts places Craste’s work in dialogue with selections from the museum’s renowned ceramics collection. Juxtaposed with pieces such as a rare French porcelain and a 2,500-year-old Greek Olympic vase, the exhibition illuminates a continuum of beauty, symbolism, and social authority across millennia.
“Even though people often dismiss decorative porcelain vases as being merely ‘pretty,’ the history of porcelain is filled with drama and intrigue — which fuels Laurent Craste’s work,” says Johnson.
A highlight of the exhibition is Iconocraste à la barre à clou II (2019), recently acquired by the Everson. The gilded porcelain vessel pierced by a crowbar exemplifies Craste’s balance of satire and reverence, destruction rendered as commentary.
Courtesy of the artist
Laurent Craste, Grand vase Montcalm II, 2019/2025, Porcelain, glaze, bright gold, and darts, 36 × 13 1/5 × 11 2/5 inches
Presented within I.M. Pei’s iconic modernist structure, Iconoclasts offers a timely meditation on fragility, not only of objects, but of the systems and symbols we inherit.
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Laurent Craste: Iconoclasts
Start Date:
November 15, 2025
End Date:
May 24, 2026
Venue:
Everson Museum of Art
City:
