Contemporary, fired clay with applied polychrome glazes, unsigned.

26 x 18 x 18 in.

Xavier Toubes has been working as a ceramic artist for over 40 years, with a unique intuitive process often involving multiple firings and glazes. For Toubes, being an artist is “a way of understanding and being in the world, a tool to knowledge.”

After working at Winchcombe Pottery in Gloucestershire, England in the late 70s, Xavier spent a year in residency at the Seminario de Estudios Cerámicos de Sargadelos (factory) in Spain. He attended the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University from 1980-83. After graduating with a Master of Fine Arts, he taught in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 1991. In 1989 he became involved in the creation of the European Ceramics Work Centre in Den Bosch, Netherlands, and was the Artistic Director from its opening in 1991 until the autumn of 1999 when he started teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Present: Professor Emeritus).
He has exhibited frequently and lectured in numerous universities and international forums, and his work is in private and public collections in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include: Patricia Rieger, Xavier Toubes. Zolla Lieberman Gallery. Chicago (2022); PASSION (Patricia Rieger, Xavier Toubes) Galerie Metzger. Johannesberg, Germany (2021); and Kunstforum, Solothurn, Switzerland (2021).

He is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva, Switzerland. His awards include a grant from the Ministry of Culture, Spain in 1983, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1986, a North Carolina Arts Council 1986 Artist Fellowship, a Southern Center for Contemporary Art Individual Artist Fellowship in 1988, first prize at Bienal Europea de Cerámica, Museu de Cerámica de Manises in 1993, and Premio da Critica Galicia Artes Plásticas in 1995.

Some chipping along the base; small area of paint restoration to one area of glaze.