Anders Ruhwald

Anders Herwald Ruhwald is a Danish-American sculptor.

He works primarily in clay, a medium he has been drawn to since he was 15.

Ruhwald's work blends references from functional objects to classical sculpture and can take the form of singular objects as well as immersive installations

Ruhwald completed his BFA at the Royal Danish Academy in Bornholm, Denmark in 2000.

While there, he apprenticed for artist Jun Kaneko, whose work had a lasting influence on his practice.

Ruhwald finished his MA at Royal College of Art in London in 2005, studying under Martin Smith, Allison Britton and Emmanuel Cooper.

Central to Ruhwald's work is the idea that "the messy practicality of objects is something to be embraced and not occluded" and his work can be understood as an amalgamation of both art and design without giving regard to the hierarchies normally assigned to these.

Instead, Ruhwald's work implies that "subjectivity arises in the perception of differences, one that is both durational and spatially determined".

Ruhwald's work is rooted "the 20th century Scandinavian tradition of the Formgiver in which the artisan compensates for modernity and our enigmatic dissatisfaction with it".

His work is often highly crafted and a large part of his practice is dedicated to material experimentation and surface development, and as a result Glenn Adamson has noted that "for all their compressed particularity, [his] sculptures are also enlivened by inexhaustible nuance. Ruhwald takes seriously the idea that surface is where form interfaces with spatial context, so his surfaces have an intensity in all registers".

Solo presentations of Ruhwald's work have been mounted at Indianapolis Museum of Art; Casa Museo Jorn, Italy; MOCA Cleveland; Kunstner Forbundet, Norway; The Saarinen House, Cranbrook Art Museum, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK.

He was an assistant professor at NSCAD in Halifax, Canad a in 2005/06, CU Boulder in Colorado in 2007, An Associate Professor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007/08 and the Artist in Residence and Head of Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art from 2008 until he resigned in 2017.

In 2011, Ruhwald won the Gold Prize at the Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennial in South Korea, and he was awarded the Sotheby's Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2007.

His works is the included collections of Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Art Institute of Chicago, US; Philadelphia Museum of Art, US; Detroit Institute of Art, US; Indianapolis Museum of Art, US; The Denver Art Museum, US; The British Crafts Council; Nasjonal Museet, Oslo, Norway; Musee de Arts Decoratifs, Paris; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Norway; Icheon World Ceramic Center, South Korea; Röhsska Museum, Sweden; Musée Magnelli, Vallauris, France; Design Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark; Clay Museum, Denmark; and Design Museum, Helsinki, Finland.

Ruhwald is also a teacher and has taught sculpture and ceramics in North America and Europe.

From 2018 to 2022, he was a visiting professor at The National Academy of Art in Norway.

In 2019, he completed the permanent installation Unit 1: 3583 Dubois St in Detroit supported by the Knight Foundation, The Graham Foundation, The [Gilbert Family Foundation and the Danish Art Foundation.