The Sculpture Trail benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Anni Mertens
Wink To Go, 2025 Glazed stoneware (ceramics), 350 x 55 x 55 cm
Presented by Valerius Gallery, B19
Location
16, bd Royal, L-2949 Luxembourg
Art Walk Challenge
With the kind support of Fonds du Logement
Playfulness and precision meet in the sculptural practice of Anni Mertens (1995, Luxembourg), who blurs the line between softness and solidity, abstraction and functionality. Working with glazed ceramics, metal, and found materials, she bends, twists, and assembles forms that hover between industrial design and bodily extension. These ambiguous objects play visual and spatial games, exploring balance, color, and texture while questioning notions of utility and ornament. Together, they form a poetic landscape that reflects on the body, memory, and our enduring impulse to play.
Anni Mertens (b. 1995, Luxembourg) finalized her MA degree in Fine Art (with a focus on ceramic and glass) at LUCA School of Arts, in Gent (BE) and her BA degree at HKU Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht, NL. She works with ceramics, steel, found objects and a healthy dose of humour. Her sculptural work embraces both abstraction an disfiguration, the same as precision and looseness. Once her individual sculptures are grouped together on diverse structures, they form a theatre of the absurd. Anni Mertens playfully bends, coats and twists materials in such a way that it is hard to distinguish what’s solid and what’s porous, what’s delicate and what’s not. The skeuomorphic objects that make up the installations find common ground in their relationship with the body. These objects situate themselves somewhere between extensions and analogies of the body, playing visual and spatial games as they form a trail, seeking poetic coherence between shape, colour and textures bending and flexing concrete and ceramics while exploring the limits of their material capacities. The inspiration of the play-drive or the play impulse, explains why there are always playful elements coming back in her installations. Intuition plays an important role in her process, so she follows the material and the material follows back. The assemblage of sculptures refer to our journeys which are filled with the unexpected, questioning how we grow throughout these journeys and do we ever outgrow the urge to play?
Discover the ART WALK by downloading the map here.
