Paul Quéré French Abstract Ceramic Bowl | La Po(é)terie

A large ceramic bowl by French artist Paul Quéré (1931–1993), stamped La Po(é)terie to the base and decorated with an expressive abstract composition of earthy colour and fragmented geometric forms. Across the broad interior, ochre, olive, moss green, rust, cobalt and charcoal shapes move across a pale, speckled ground. Fine dark lines divide the surface almost like a drawing, while shifts between matte, granular and softly glazed areas give the bowl a wonderfully tactile quality. The effect feels less like decoration applied to a vessel and more like a painting translated into clay. At nearly 30 cm across, the bowl has a strong sculptural presence. Its generous scale allows Quéré’s abstract language to unfold fully, with the irregularity of the surface, hand-worked details and subtle glaze variations giving the piece a distinctly individual character. Quéré was a French painter, ceramicist and poet whose practice moved freely between clay, colour and abstraction. Before establishing La Po(é)terie in Brittany, he spent much of his career in Provence and was connected to the postwar ceramic scene in Vallauris, where works from his Atelier Le Minotaure are documented from the 1960s. His ceramics often sit somewhere between functional object and artwork, using the vessel as a surface for gesture, line and colour. This bowl is a particularly vivid example of that approach — expressive, tactile and completely at ease as a standalone object.