Press room
10,000 ceramic gestures. 5 years. A living archive.
CLSTR is a wall work in fragments — thousands of unique ceramic pieces, collected individually. Each piece stands on its own, but takes on its full meaning in a wall composition.
A work in dispersion
Facts
- Published GSTRs
- 144
- Goal
- 10,000
- Duration
- 5 years (2025–2030)
- Format
- 5–10 cm, one of one
- Material
- Stoneware and porcelain, house glazes
- Technique
- Hand-built, marks of the gesture visible
- Firing
- Glazed, single fire at 1,240 °C
- Price
- Sold by weight
- Studio
- Maurs, Cantal, France
- Origin
- Netherlands — lives and works in France
The project in brief
Renate works in clay as a dialogue with her digital past — after years in digital design where everything had to be pixel-perfect, the gesture returns to the center: the pressure of the hand, the irregularity, the visible kept as a deliberate choice.
The work lives in dispersion: 10,000 fragments spread across hundreds of collections, never reunited physically. Only the digital archive on clstr.art — and, on completion around 2030, a single virtual installation — show the whole.
CLSTR is built to grow with you. Collectors often start with a single GSTR and expand their wall over the years, fragment by fragment. A patch is not a purchase but a relationship that builds over time.
High-resolution photos, video rotations and 3D scans document each GSTR; augmented reality lets buyers see the piece on their own wall before purchase. A patch generator combines several pieces into compositions that can be bought in one click.
Pieces can be hung individually or freely combined on a wall.
Browse the full archive →Quotes
« CLSTR is an exercise in letting go of perfection. »
« What will my 9999th gesture be? Still a naive flower form? »
« Each fragment bears the trace of the gesture — the opposite of pixel-perfection. »
« A patch is not a purchase — it’s a relationship that builds over time. »
About the artist
Renate Frotscher is a Dutch ceramic artist based in France. Before focusing on ceramics, she worked for many years as an internationally awarded digital designer. Her work draws on Baroque and Rococo vocabulary and preserves the pressure marks, ridges and irregularities of the gesture.
For Renate, CLSTR is a dialogue between her digital past and her manual present — an exercise in letting go of perfection. The question that carries the project stays open: what will the 9999th gesture be? Still a naive flower form, or something that can only emerge from thousands of repetitions?
Full bio →Press images
Available images: overview (wall installation), detail (individual GSTR), composition (patch), context (collector’s wall). Free for editorial use with credit “© Renate Frotscher / CLSTR”. Right-click → Save image.
Press contact
Renate Frotscher
For all press inquiries, interviews, loans, high-resolution visuals or studio visits — feel free to write directly.
contact@clstr.art