Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to announce Laughing Castles, an exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Julia Kunin. The show will be on view in the front gallery at 87 Franklin Street, opening October 24 and running through December 6, 2025.
Julia Kunin’s hand-built ceramic sculptures embody a smooth sensuality, drawing on symbols of lesbian visibility alongside tropes from Modernist, Pop, and Op Art. Glittering metallic glazes amplify her carved and slab-built architectural forms, propelling them into the realm of glam with a wink toward kitsch. Repeated and mirrored body parts such as lips, eyes, and breasts form abstracted double portraits. In these coded, psychedelic compositions, Kunin asserts a feminist and queer presence within art historical lineages reaching back to Marsden Hartley and Victor Vasarely. As she notes, “Geometry alone may seem benign, but in this context, the geometry becomes subversive.”
Symmetrical forms such as keyholes and labryses appear as architectural latticeworks in clay, embedding symbolic meaning and near-spiritual iconography into their structures and surfaces. The exhibition’s title, Laughing Castles, refers to a recurring form in Kunin’s work: a tower-like fortress topped with smiling lips. Kunin underscores the need for laughter, joy, and the erotic within activism in politically fraught times.
Julia Kunin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA from Wellesley College and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Kunin’s fellowships and residencies include the Fulbright Scholarship to Hungary in 2013; the 2010 Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant to Hungary.; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; Art Omi; John Michael Kohler Arts/Industry; ; The MacDowell Colony; Yaddo; The Vermont Studio Center; The Core Program at the Glassell School of Art, Houston; and Skowhegan. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, New Women’s Work: Re-imagining Craft in Contemporary Art, by Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (Smith Street Books, 2024), and Lesbian Art in America by Harmony Hammond (Rizzoli, 2000). Kunin’s work has been included in exhibitions at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco; The Museum of Art and Design, New York; The Museum of Applied Art and Design, Frankfurt, Germany; The Sculpture Center, New York; and The Brattleboro Museum, Vermont. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The German Leather Museum, Offenbach, Germany; the Margulies Collection, Miami, Florida; and the Museum of Art and Design, New York.
