Vessel sculpture, Gelber Vogel,

1948

Margrit Linck-Daepp embarked on her creative path as a seeker, but then pursued her vision consistently. The yellow bird is typical of her 1940s phase, when the Swiss ceramic artist devoted her attention to zoological and anthropomorphic forms. She showed a potter how to transform the designs she drew into the desired vessel form on the pottery wheel. The resulting vase was then transformed in Linck-Daepp’s hands into a plaintive if not downright tyrannical young bird whose inability to fly is underlined by the piece’s low center of gravity. The bird’s elongated neck ends in a head with wide-open beak, while roughly stuck-on wings keep the body in balance. Linck-Daepp demonstrates here a marvelous relish in disrupting the smooth form, an attitude she displayed in other vessels by twisting, squeezing, or squashing them to skillfully create new and unexpected shapes. Margrit Daepp attended the Keramischen Fachschule in Bern and a private school of applied arts in Munich in the early 1920s. Stays in Berlin and Paris, where she lived for three years after marrying the sculptor Walter Linck, brought the couple into close contact with the Surrealist scene. At the time, Linck-Daepp exclusively made figurative drawings. Starting in 1930, she began to create household ceramics that took up the forms of Heimberg pottery but painted in an individualistic style, and she then quickly developed her own artistic language based on the defining elements of mutation and reduction. (Sabine Flaschberger)