Xavier Toubes

Xavier Toubes (born 1947, A Coruña, Spain) is a ceramic sculptor and educator whose career spans Europe, the United States and Asia. Before turning to art he worked in banking, at the Banco Exterior de España in Avilés from 1967 to 1969 and at the Banco Español en Londres in London from 1969 to 1974, where in 1970 he co-founded the Grupo de Traballo Galego en Londres. He studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 1974 to 1977, served a one-year apprenticeship with Raymond Finch at Winchcombe Pottery in Gloucestershire, spent a year in residence at the Seminario de Estudios Cerámicos de Sargadelos in Galicia, and took his Master of Fine Arts at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University between 1980 and 1983.

After graduating he taught in the Art Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 1993. In 1989 he became involved in the creation of the European Ceramics Work Centre (EKWC) in 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, and was its co-founder and Artistic Director from its opening in 1991 until the autumn of 1999, when he joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He has been a member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva since 1986, sat on its council in 2010 and 2011, and has served as external examiner at the Royal College of Art in London.

Toubes understands his work as an ongoing dialogue between the artist, the object and its context, carried out through the alchemical nature of ceramics: a process of multiple glazes and firings that keeps his interaction with the object open and lets the work be guided intuitively. Critics have written of his sculpture under titles such as Exquisite Nomad, The Infinite in Finitude and Descriptions without a Place, and his own essays, among them Thinking Matters: For a New Language in Ceramics and Thoughts about Intuition and Practice, set out his thinking on material, learning and practice.

He has exhibited frequently in the United States, Europe and Asia since the late 1970s, with solo exhibitions at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, the Fundación Luis Seoane in A Coruña, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the Sala Luzán in Zaragoza, and at galleries including Perimeter Gallery and Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Galerie De Witte Voet in Amsterdam, Kunstforum Solothurn, Galerie Metzger and James Harris Gallery. Group exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Musée Ariana in Geneva, the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona, the World Ceramic Biennale in Korea and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. He has lectured at universities and international forums throughout Europe, North America and Asia.

His awards include a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture in 1983, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship in 1986, a Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art Individual Artist Fellowship, the NCECA Clay National prize in 1991, the Premio Gallego Vilar at the Bienal Europea de Cerámica in Manises, the Premio da Crítica Galicia for the visual arts in 1995, and selection as a finalist for the Loewe Craft Prize in 2021. His work is held in public and private collections across the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, the Colección Banco de España, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Musée Ariana, the Keramikmuseum Westerwald, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Racine Art Museum, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and the Macao Museum of Art. He lives and works in Chicago.