Johan Creten

Johan Creten is a Belgian sculptor based in Paris. Though trained as a painter, he soon turned to ceramic and bronze as his primary mediums. Affectionately known as “The Clay Gipsy,” and working wherever he has the opportunity, from Miami to Mexico, Den Haag to New York, Creten is considered a frontrunner in the revival of ceramics, alongside Lucio Fontana and Thomas Schütte.

He has exhibited at the Louvre Museum, the Musée Nationale Eugène Delacroix in Paris, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, the Istanbul Biennale, the Mamco in Geneva, and the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp, among many other places. In 1996, he was awarded the Prix de Rome and could stay as resident in the Villa Medici. Between 2004 and 2007, he was visiting artist at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres. In 2009, he was nominated for the Flemish Culture Prize. In 2013, he held the Theodore Randall Chair at  Alfred University, New York. In 2014, he presented a major solo exhibition of monumental bronzes in the sculpture park of the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp. In 2015, an entire room was dedicated to his pioneering work in the exhibition CERAMIX at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht and in 2016 at La Maison Rouge in Paris.