Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood at Casa Malaparte

This book was published on the occasion of Shio Kusaka and Jonas Wood at Casa Malaparte, a one-night-only exhibition in July 2023 at Casa Malaparte, the famous cliffside house built on the Italian island of Capri by Curzio Malaparte (the pseudonym of Kurt Erich Suckert), a provocative writer, editor, and intellectual active in the Italian literary and artistic avant-garde. The juxtaposed bodies of work show how Kusaka and Wood draw from each other’s practices as potter and painter to playfully investigate the tensions between representation and expression. Kusaka’s porcelain vessels and animal figurines and Wood’s painted landscapes of locations that range from Gstaad to Los Angeles revel in the unique setting of Casa Malaparte, an exemplar of twentieth-century Italian architecture designed in 1938.

The catalogue is fully illustrated with color plates of forty-six porcelain and stoneware works by Kusaka and eleven paintings by Wood, as well as details and installation views. It also includes several texts that illuminate aspects of Casa Malaparte’s conception and significance: a conversation between Alessia Rositani Suckert and Serena Cattaneo Adorno, an essay by Hanneke Skerath and Douglas Fogle, and an excerpt from Curzio Malaparte’s Benedetti Italiani, translated from the Italian.