Khmer Art Overseas – Ceramic Highlights:
The Rietberg Museum in Zurich, Switzerland has a collection of Khmer artifacts, which I highlighted two days ago, though it’s their hoard of ceramic and pottery items that stand out. There are 124 pieces, out of 1,500+ which were donated to the museum in 2009 by Swiss art dealer and collector Toni Gerber, in the Khmer inventory and they are a myriad of animals, birds, fish and other figures, providing a thorough window into the ceramic artistry of the late Angkor period, particularly in the twelfth century. I've selected 15 examples showing the wide spectrum of the Rietberg-Gerber collection. For Gerber (1932–2010), his own collecting began with a series of visits to Southeast Asia since the 1970s, with a key focus on Burmese and Thai clay votive tablets, ceramics, and bronzes. He had opened an art gallery in Bern’s Old Town in 1964 and gifted many items to a series of museums, especially the Rietberg.
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