Hella Berent – Materie Blau, Matter Blue

The colour blue has always held a special meaning for people – as the colour of the sky and the sea, of the divine and the sacred, of the infinite and the unfathomable. The Cologne-based artist Hella Berent has long been fascinated by the blues and turquoises of Islamic countries. She has travelled widely in these countries, worked in some of them for extended periods and studied in depth the making of blue and turquoise ceramics, a technology that has now all but disappeared.

The book brings together texts, photographs and illustrations of Hella Berent’s blue sculptures with an essay by the historian Hans-Joachim Bieber on the origins of turquoise and lapis lazuli and of the materials used for blue and turquoise ceramics – from the beginnings in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC to the imitation of blue-painted Chinese porcelain in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. It also includes a text by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy written for the artist.