"Beatrice Wood combines her colors like a painter, makes them vibrate like a musician… Water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine." - Anaïs Nin
A cross-generational exhibition placing Beatrice Wood’s ceramics and drawings in dialogue with contemporary artists exploring surface, spirit, and transformation.
Charlotte Call’s inaugural exhibition begins with a question: how can art help us find meaning? Fire and Life offers a belief that significant objects can lead us to both spiritual and intellectual insight, moving toward artworks as vessels of presence, transmission, and care. The title is drawn from a line by Anaïs Nin: “I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire.” Nin was a close friend of Beatrice Wood and spoke about her luster works with admiration: “Beatrice Wood combines her colors like a painter, makes them vibrate like a musician… Water poured from one of her jars will taste like wine.”
Beatrice Wood worked with heat to create her sculptures and lived her life with a comparable intensity. She lived to 105, and when asked about the secret to her longevity, she replied: “I owe it all to chocolates, art books, and young men.”
Anchored by a selection of luminous luster-glazed ceramics by Beatrice Wood, the exhibition places her work in dialogue with contemporary contributions by Durimel, Cecilia Granara, Amy Steel, and Yuwei Tu. Each artist engages transformation, vitality, and emotional presence through surface, gesture, and symbolic intensity. Their practices treat matter as a language for spirit, memory, and renewal.
Beatrice Wood (born 1893, San Francisco; died 1998, Ojai)
A foundational figure in American ceramics, Beatrice Wood developed a practice known for its mastery of luster glazes, sensual forms, and irreverent wit. She played a central role in the early twentieth-century avant-garde. In the 1910s, she was closely linked to Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was part of the New York Dada circle with artists like Man Ray and Francis Picabia. She co-edited The Blind Man with Duchamp and helped organize the 1917 Blind Man’s Ball. Wood discovered ceramics at the age of forty, after moving to Los Angeles, and continued making work until the end of her life at 105. She later settled in Ojai, drawn by its natural beauty and its spiritual community, including Annie Besant and Jiddu Krishnamurti. Her remarkable life helped inspire the character of Rose in James Cameron’s Titanic. Today, her legacy is carried forward by the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Ojai. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Durimel (born 1993, Paris)
Jalan and Jibril Durimel are twin brothers working as an artist duo. Born to French-Caribbean parents in Paris, they spent two years on the island of Guadeloupe before moving to Miami at age four, and then to the island of St. Maarten at twelve. It was on Saint Maarten that they became inspired by cinema and set off to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen to study film. The twin brothers, now based in New York City, draw inspiration from their diverse upbringing and a passion for the evident beauties of the natural world. Through visual expression, their work aims to serve as a spectacle of cultural cross-pollination and an inquiry into the decadence of simplicity. Their work has appeared in i-D, Dazed, Vogue, and L’Uomo Vogue, and has been exhibited at Foam Museum in Amsterdam, Haus der Statistik in Berlin, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.
Cecilia Granara (born 1991, Jeddah)
Cecilia Granara lives and works between Paris and Mexico City. She studied at Central Saint Martins, ENSBA Paris, Hunter College (MFA exchange), and received her MFA from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2020. Granara’s paintings draw on mysticism, poetry, and personal history to explore longing, transformation, and spiritual renewal. She has presented solo and duo exhibitions at Cassina Projects in Milan, CAC Passerelle in Brittany, Exo Exo in Paris, and Sapling Gallery in London. Granara participated in institutional group shows at Musée D'Orsay (FR), Ford Foundation Gallery (U.S.A.) , FRAC Corsica (FR), Fondation Pernod Ricard (FR), Triennale Milano (IT), Château La Coste (FR), LAAC Musée de Dunkerque (FR), Centre D'Art Contemporain Passerelle (FR), Centre d'Art Parc Saint Léger (FR), Musée Cérès Franco (FR), Contemporary Art Center of Armenia, Zeyrek Cynili Hammam Museum (Turkey), MAXXI, Rome (IT) and ps120 Berlin (Germany). Granara was a finalist of the Antoine Marin Prize in 2019, the Cairo Prize (Italy) in 2021, the Club GAMEC Prize (Italy) in 2024, and the MAC Lissone Prize (Italy) in 2025.
Amy Steel (born 1981, UK)
Amy Steel lives and works in London. She earned her MFA with distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2019 and her BA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Steel’s work spans painting and performance, drawing on archetype, transformation, and the charged inner life of women. Her work often creates dreamlike psychological landscapes that explore themes of embodiment and intuition. She has exhibited at Bim Bam Gallery in Paris, Tabula Rasa Gallery in Beijing, and Niru Ratnam Gallery in London, and received the Adrian Carruthers Award for 2019–2020. Her paintings are noted for their luminous colour, sensuality, and symbolic resonance.
Yuwei Tu (born 1995, Sichuan, China)
Yuwei Tu is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice centers on impermanence, emotional architecture, and quiet acts of composition. She is currently based in New Haven, completing her MFA at Yale School of Art. Tu’s work has been shown at Rusha & Co in Los Angeles, Palo Gallery in New York, and featured in New American Paintings. Her approach echoes Beatrice Wood’s sensitivity to embodied form and material intuition.