Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye

Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye (b. 1938, Istanbul, TR) is a ceramic artist known for her refined, monochrome stoneware bowls, which she has been producing for nearly sixty years. Working with the ancient coiling technique and a traditional wooden kick wheel, Ebüzziya Siesbye creates vessels that bear the intimate marks of her hand, balancing density and spaciousness, firmness and fragility. Fired at high temperatures, her bowls possess a stone-like solidity, while their sharp-edged lips and small, recessed bases lend them an impression of levitation. Though often unadorned, some pieces feature delicate horizontal lines along the rim to, as the artist describes, “prevent them from lifting off the ground.”

Ebüzziya Siesbye studied sculpture at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts before working at ceramic studios in Höhr-Grenzhausen, DE, and Istanbul. In 1963, she moved to Denmark to join the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory, later founding her first independent studio in Copenhagen in 1969. She has lived and worked in Paris since 1987. She has been awarded many honors, including the 2022 Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation Honor Award and the Aydın Doğan Award, and her work has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul (TR), and the Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen (DK). Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramics are held in numerous museum collections, including the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New-York (NY); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (FR); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL); the Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen (DK); the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (SE); the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, (SCT); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), among others.