Torbjørn Kvasbø

Torbjørn Kvasbø (Norwegian, b. 1953) is a ceramic artist of international acclaim, with a career spanning several decades. He lives and works in Venabygd, Norway. His practice primarily works that challenge and push his own personal boundaries as well as the physical extent of the medium. His Stacked series of monumentally scaled works is an archetypal vessel shape–made by hand-modeled stacked cylindric tubes–and reimagined in a spiraling form. It is also conceptually a body, a three-dimensional torso with gestures and states of mind. Of his work and process, Kvasbo states “my work process in the clay medium offers a lot of resistance, and it reveals to me the forces over which I have no control – the incalculable elements of my inner being. My emotions and feelings are physically discharged into the work, and they become actual experiences themselves.” Through this transference of mental and emotional energy into physical sculpture, Kvasbo is continuing in the centuries-old tradition of artists as alchemists.

Kvasbo was the Professor and Head of the Ceramics Department at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden from 1996-to 2000. From 2000-to 2008, he was Professor and Head of the Ceramic and Glass Department at Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden. He has exhibited widely and internationally.