Multiplicity without Exception

Michael Kærgaard – Ceramic Sculpture

Michael Kærgaard, born 1980 in Aalborg, is a self-taught Danish ceramic artist whose practice has gained increasing visibility since 2023 through collaborations with the gallery HAGD Contemporary. Working primarily in glazed stoneware, he has developed a material language that merges figuration with abstraction, humor with unease, and tenderness with threat.

Kærgaard’s sculptures do not present monsters as singular events. They appear in clusters, sequences, constellations. Heads sprout horns, spikes pierce porous surfaces, small openings puncture rounded bodies. Gold tips emerge like signals. The forms oscillate between vessel and figure, relic and organism. What drives the work is not narrative but multiplication. The creature repeats, shifts, mutates. It is never an exception but a condition.

Surface is central. Rough, cratered textures absorb glaze unevenly, producing porous skins that feel eroded rather than finished. The objects often evoke artifacts or archaeological remnants, yet their immediacy resists nostalgia. Kærgaard situates his practice between abstraction, expressionism, and figuration without committing fully to any one of them. The tension lies in attraction and discomfort coexisting in the same object.

HAGD Contemporary: Michael Kærgaard and the Logic of Monsters

HAGD Contemporary presents Michael Kærgaard’s Mother of Many, an exhibition of stoneware figures where monstrosity, tenderness, and material force collide.

This is CatapultDominique Catherina Foertig

This Artist Focus complements our exhibition article on Mother of Many, currently on view at HAGD Contemporary in Aalborg, where Kærgaard’s largest presentation to date unfolds as a dense constellation of these recurring beings.

Instagram Michael Kærgaard
Hagd contemporary on Instagram

Notable Artworks and insight in Michael Kærgaard Studio process

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Exhibitions

Long form article - Spotlight Liz Hernández