Austrian pottery market
Dear friends of the Austrian Pottery Market!
From 25 to 27 August 2023, daily from 10:00 – 18:00, the 35th Austrian Pottery Market will take place in the ceramics town of Gmunden, turning the Rathausplatz and Esplanade into spectacular venues for Austrian and international clay art.
As every year in August, Gmunden will once again become the center of renowned European pottery elite, and the ceramic town will be transformed into a colorful stage for the diversity of contemporary international pottery art.
About 130 ceramicists from different countries present and offer their works for sale. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to get a comprehensive overview of the European ceramics scene.
The market, which offers its audience the setting and flair of an impressive exhibition of ceramic art and handicrafts, is already taking place for the 35th time this year and has a continuously growing success story, is now at home in the top league of European ceramic events.
In the usual manner, a guest country has been invited this time as well, and special attention will be paid to it: in 2023, the spotlight will be on current ceramic events in Poland.
As in previous years, the Pottery Market Prize of the Ceramic City of Gmunden will be announced and awarded among the participating exhibitors, this time under the title “Animal Sculpture”. The art competition also gives visitors the opportunity to award a public prize. Three prizes will be judged by the participants themselves. The submitted and subsequently awarded works will be exhibited in Franz-Josef-Park near the market area.
Every year, a very special collector’s item is offered for sale at the pottery market: a new, limited edition copy of the Gmundner Jahresbecher, this year designed by Werner Ertl. This is available during the pottery market at the information stand on Rathausplatz, furthermore also in the ceramics store Gmunden.
Since 1999, ceramic designer and artist Thomas Benirschke’s hands-on campaign “Turn the Magic Pottery Wheel with Four Hands” has been a very special crowd puller for young and old at home and abroad. Making clay “comprehensible”, learning to “feel and shape”, happens here playfully and easily.
For 2 years now, the ceramics store run by the city of Gmunden itself has become a sought-after shopping destination for lovers of ceramic art as a year-round “miniature pottery market”.
Accompanying the pottery market, Gmundner galleries and exhibition spaces have been showing works by both emerging and established ceramic artists for many years.
This time, special importance is attached to the group exhibition of the guest country Poland in the Seeschloss Ort as well as to the Personale 45 years of ceramics of the renowned ceramic artist Barbara Reisinger, who is closely connected to the ceramic city of Gmunden, in the K-Hof Kammerhofmuseum .
