Malcolm Wright and Beth Ganz open an exhibition of new work on October 20th at the Spheris Gallery in Hanover, New Hampshire. A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday October 27th, from 6-8 p.m. The exhibition runs through December 5th, 2007.

Malcolm Wright’s forms, highly prized by his collectors for their simplicity and inherent elegance, are made from extruded brick clay, unglazed, and left for the kiln fire and ash to leave their mark indelibly in the clay. The gradation of subtle coloration is a wonder, when one understands just how high the heat needs to be in the kiln, and how close each piece might come to utter disaster. All of Wright’s work is fired in his private, hand-built kiln that reaches 21 feet in length. Dug into the hillside of his Vermont property, the twice-a-year firings bring the kiln to life, as 100 sculptural works are soft fired at temperatures close to 2100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Form is paramount in the resulting pieces. Each embodies a compression of conceptual and visual clarity, and each flirts with the juxtaposition of mass and void. Its beauty springs from an innate authority, something that Wright has committed his artistic life to understanding: how to transcend stylistic or intellectual conceits and develop an idea in two directions at once–inside, outside; curve and line; form and suggested function.

In this series of pieces, he succeeds beautifully. The forms all have a strong, spare, minimalist, and structural quality. The geometric shapes activate the space they surround, and the space they occupy. The question of within and without is posed over and over, each time with a decidedly new and enlivening postulate derived from his innovative imagination. Walking around each form, one experiences the changing curve of the shape’s edges, the unexpected dark density of the cutout, the strength of the coupled sides, and the purity of how the geometries are expressed, all of which are complemented by the gradation of ash-driven hues along the sides of each piece.

Wright holds an MFA from George Washington University and apprenticed for two-years with Tarouemon Nakazato the 12th in Karatsu, Japan. Nakazato is honored as a National Living Treasure in Japan, in a lineage of ceramists dating back to the sixteenth century. Wright is also the recipient of the 2003 Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

Beth Ganz’s new imagery focuses on the topographies and reliefs of Iceland in both the negative and positive - the photogravures feature volcanic and geothermal sites, including petrified lava flows, inert volcanoes, obsidian lava fields and geothermal steam vents. The addition of hand-painted maps interjects an element of historical exploration, which complements the nineteenth century process of photogravure. The flux between the surface of the image and the photograph’s illusory depth alludes, as well, to landscape paintings’ historical legacy of offering a window into another world.

Ganz’s images are at once supported and disrupted by the play between negative and positive, surface and depth, landscape image and map-like painted detail. The use of the fragile kozo paper in conjunction with the weight and mass of the topographies serves the artist’s intent well; the collaged reverse imagery becomes a finely honed exchange of mirror-image shapes.

Ganz has had several solo exhibitions in New York and elsewhere; her prints have been included in many group shows in the United States, England, Europe, and India since 1989. Her work is well represented in public and private collections including; the Hofstra Museum, Hempstead, NY; New York Historical Society, New York, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; New York Public Library, New York, NY; and U.S. Department of State Art Bank.

Pictured: Malcolm Wright, “Three Figures”, 2006, wood fired brick clay, 13 1/2 x 8 1/2 x 6 3/4 inches. Photograph by John Polak.

On October 6, 2007, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art will open a solo exhibition by Peter Callas entitled, Sparks.

Charlemagne
2003, woodfired stoneware, 48″ x 24″ x 24″

From the Daum Museum website:
Peter Callas is a ceramic sculptor working in the tradition of abstract expressionism who has produced a repertoire of sculpted images grounded in the Zen aesthetic. He is one of the foremost sculptors working in clay utilizing the anagama kiln to produce large scale expressionist forms. For many years he fired the works of the preeminent American clay artist Peter Voulkos in his New Jersey kiln and traveled extensively worldwide with Voulkos as his assistant. Today he is considered to be one of America’s foremost authorities on the wood fire anagama kiln tradition. He has found his own voice influenced by Voukos but uniquely original. He has exhibited extensively in Korea, Japan and Norway and his works are in museum collections in those countries as well as in Hungary, Brazil and numerous American museums including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art.

The exhibit runs through January 27, 2008. In conjunction with the opening there is a free two-day workshop with Peter that is open to the public: Friday, October 5th, 9:00 am-3:00pm and Saturday, October 6th, 9:00 am-12:00 pm.

A lecture by the artist is scheduled for Saturday, October 6th at 2:00 pm.

A 48-page full-color catalog is availablewith an Introduction by Curator Douglass Freed and an essay “Romancing the Mud” by Ronald Kuchta. To order a catalog, contact the museum.

This review appeared in the New York Times on September 7, 2007.

It’s Just Clay, but How About a Little Respect?
by Roberta Smith

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it is also the grandmother of that staff of life called art. This is especially clear with ceramics, the medium at which nearly all cultures excel, spurred by the basic need for things in which to carry water, store grain, serve up victuals. From meeting such needs, all else apparently flowed: abstract painting as much as bathroom fixtures. Ceramics has one of the richest histories in the world, more than can be absorbed in a lifetime. We all have our favorites, be it Greek vases or Fiesta ware, Tang courtesans or cookie jars, Edo tea bowls or Southern face jugs, Wedgwood or Russel Wright.

But, perplexingly, the mainstream art world’s appreciation of contemporary ceramics remains a capricious, on-and-off, up-and-down thing — even when, as now, it seems to be in on/up mode. The latest symptom is “Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramic,” a sprawling, ebullient season opener of works by 31 artists at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea.

This show tries to position ceramics in the mainstream by ignoring just about anyone who hasn’t more or less achieved high-end acceptance, a snobbish ploy. “Vessels are so over” is the apparent subtext of this potpourri of the figurative, abstract and installational.

But you have to admire a show that can keep its dignity while ranging from the cool-handed late-Conceptualist Sam Durant (plastic lawn chairs cast in porcelain with delicate chinoiserie glazes) to the neo-Neo-Expressionist Jonathan Meese, with his supposedly wild and crazy busts. The show’s stylistic and physical scope defines ceramics as a commodious, seductive medium with fairly firm limits. But it is also a great leveler of aesthetic differences. And within those limits, it seems as hard to fail as it is to make something that surpasses generic competence and appeal. The frequency of mushy little figures here confirms this. (Ceramics accommodates so many levels of skill that the statement “My 5-year-old could do that” has an unusually high rate of accuracy.)

The elder statesman here is the great Ken Price, whose résumé reads like a flowchart covering the last four decades of ceramics’ shifting fortunes. His bulbous, suggestive undulating blob, aglow with color, presides over the main gallery like a quiet, compact king in a noisy young court. (The bright, variegated patterns of a monster head/flower vase — in papier-mâché rather than clay, and filled with real lilies — by the Swiss art star Urs Fischer could almost be an irreverent hommage to Mr. Price’s fine-pored, jewel-like surface.) Also present is Rebecca Warren, a gifted British sculptor who works almost exclusively in fired clay, picking up where de Kooning’s quivering bronze figures left off.

But this is not a stretch. Both Mr. Price and Ms. Warren are represented by Matthew Marks, another blue-chip Chelsea emporium. Less visible ceramicists do not make the cut, notably Ron Nagle, who is Mr. Price’s contemporary and nearly his equal as an artist, and Kathy Butterly, a younger artist who makes abstractly erotic, decorative hybrid variations on vases and cups. Also overlooked are Lynda Benglis, who took up ceramics more than 10 years ago; Sterling Ruby, a young artist from Los Angeles who wreaks havoc with the medium; Nicole Cherubini; and Beverly Semmes.

The Gladstone effort means business in every sense. It favors artists who fall primarily into one or more of three categories: veterans of foreign biennales; young and hot; represented by the Gladstone organization. It is also a little over half European which always adds luster.

Among the veterans, Thomas Schütte and Rosemarie Trockel, who have done extensive work in ceramics, stand out. Mr. Schütte contributes an eerie monumental severed head of a woman that is the color of blood but not bloody. Even more intriguing is Ms. Trockel’s white-on-white modern daybed with glazed ceramic cushions. Its usual function thwarted, it serves as a pedestal or extended frame for a large black and white photograph of a 19th-century bronze of a black man’s head. The contrasts are unexpected, arbitrary yet inseparable: black and white, academic and modern, art and design, purity and otherness.

Certain artists seem to shine in ceramics, among them Anish Kapoor, who counters his usual sleekness with a striking roughness reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist work of Peter Voulkos. Liz Larner’s large, faceted polygons in unglazed cast porcelain on irregular bases covered with black rubber are among the best things she has ever done. (They start a lively conversation with the Trockel daybed that is joined, from an adjacent gallery, by Manfred Pernice’s white, lecternlike evocation of Giacometti.)

Paloma Varga Weisz’s reticent little figures, usually in carved wood, are stronger in clay with rich, rusty glazes. Like Kai Althoff’s version of a Tang courtesan, they seem presaged by the work of Anne Chu, who weighs in here with life-size figures called Hellish Spirits. Their velvety smoke-fired surfaces live up to the name; they evoke transcultural court jesters and have an affecting psychological presence. In other instances, including works by Mike Kelley and Sarah Lucas, the results are pleasantly routine. (Bo knows ceramics.) So is Elizabeth Peyton’s wax portrait head, conventionally modeled and reminiscent of the British sculptor Jacob Epstein.

The show also includes works by Mary Heilmann, whose abstract paintings have always been paralleled by abstract ceramics, and Andrew Lord, a crossover ceramicist who has been an art world regular since 1981. Here Mr. Lord unveils a courageous new foray, forsaking his sculptural Process Art vessels for pairings of assorted heads, skulls, hands, limbs and more abstract body parts, as well as paintinglike plaques. Overlaps with Jasper Johns, early Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Nauman and Robert Gober are hard to ignore, and create an odd sense of mastery and striving. The sensitive surfaces and grisaille glazes full of shadows, dating back to Mr. Lord’s earliest works, may carry him forward.

The show’s new faces include Klara Kristalova, a Swedish artist, who pushes the tradition of Meissen figurines toward larger scale and decidedly disturbing moments, like the sinking, blindfolded head of a man in “Pond.” The Romanian-born twins Gert and Uwe Tobias make suave assemblages that combine appropriated dishes and vases with ghoulish little hand-made figures to lighthearted effect. A Chicago artist named William O’Brien makes the show’s biggest splash with a crowded tabletop menagerie of objects, mostly vessels, both ceramic and not. Wonderfully off-hand and slovenly in a way that brings to mind doilies and contorted cigar cleaners as much as amateur pottery, the piece owes something to the imposing clusters of vases and pitchers for which Mr. Lord was first known but has its own raucous D.I.Y. energy, and an air of inclusiveness that this show, ambitious as it is, might have taken a little more to heart.

“Makers and Modelers: Works in Ceramic” is at the Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, Chelsea, (212) 206-9300, through October 13, 2007.

Photos by David Regen. Ken Price photo by Matthew Marks Gallery.