Ethan Caflisch (b. 1993 Oshkosh, Wisconsin) started at a young age working in ceramics. He attended California College of the Arts (2011-2015) and graduated with an individualized Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Visual Studies Minor, focusing on painting, sculpture, and art direction for film. He has shown at many institutions internationally, including the Richmond Art Center in California, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, XXXI in New York, Amélie Maison d’Art in Paris, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. 

Caflisch (pronounced cuh-fleesh) is currently living and working in London, England. His diverse studio practice encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, and film work.

My works are rooted in material, process and form. It started with ceramics and has since evolved to sculpture, quilted textile paintings, photography and progressively acrylic and oil painting. My practice has been a constant movement forward, introducing new materials to make pieces that still find their foundation in sculpture, but equally exist as painting.

My work exists in a variety of bodies, but the throughline is boiled down to a handful of mobile concepts: material as material, architectural thresholds, interior/exterior relationships, and most recently the figure. Each new piece is referential of recently finished work, exploring the possible bounds of translation through medium.

There is a level, or balance rather, of precision versus tolerance in my work. It’s meticulously planned out, but also incorporates and embraces the changes that need to happen in the process of making the piece a reality.

New bodies of work start with a curiosity of material. They will be mathematically refined to a hundredth of a decimal before they are cut out or painted by hand. The imperfect line that naturally forms from my heart beating, taking a breath, or just working by hand – the process makes the work larger than the piece I set out to make – perfection is only achieved when I move away from the conscious pursuit of perfection.