Four Sculptors Working in Clay

The art in this exhibition presents a series of cross-references that are illuminating, certainly in terms of clay. Pinched, pushed, glazed or painted and polished, the earthiness of clay is transformed by four sculptors at their peak.

Irving Kriesberg, focusing mostly on animals, and Bruce Gagnier with his standing figures—several years back critic David Cohen in The N.Y. Sun called Gagnier’s statues a fusion of “late Roman bronzes and Giacometti”—explore representation; Garth Evans weighs in with svelte and playful bio-morphic abstractions; Peter Schlesinger pushes the vessel to a scale that clearly marks it as sculptural rather than utilitarian. In terms of the latter, we will leave aside whether or not the vessel form is representational or not. If it is not made for use, I think then it is. And there is also a question of the figurative nature of the bio-morphic. If it did not suggest natural forms, it would not be called such. Yet, in some sense, whether abstract or figurative, all work here relates to the figure, so it is not only clay that is a common denominator.

Irving Kriesberg (b. 1919), has an astonishing resume: along with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, as an upcoming painter he was part of MoMA’s 1952 “Fifteen Americans.” There was a retrospective of his work at the Jewish Museum in 1961. Although Kriesberg explored pottery in Mexico in the Forties, it was not until 1985 that nine-month stint in Japan inspired a new dedication to clay; animal imagery from his paintings migrated to clay—and to three-dimensions. Animals in art conjure up both humor and myth. Animals are stand-ins for human beings, but Kriesberg never lets his humor descend into whimsy, and whatever mythologies are latent in his menagerie—he once said “Rather than advance art fifty years, I want to bring it back five thousand years” —he skillfully diverts the viewer by his luxurious and sometimes expressionist use of clay.

Bruce Gagnier also has a background in painting, but it has been clear for many years now that clay is his métier. His standing figures display a strange classicism struggling to emerge from bravado clay-handling. It is this tension that marks their originality and sometimes their poignancy.

Peter Schlesinger turns vessels into sculpture by the wild use of scale. Even the table-top works included here are too big for their own good. In a craft context, they would look even stranger. The tall works come close to revealing the vessel as the human figure, only half-disguised.

Garth Evans refers to his hollow but closed and highly finished sculptures as “bodies,” so the figure lurks here too. In the continuum of figuration to non-referential abstraction, they are closest to the latter, yet it is possible to see a great variety of motion and pose suggesting the animate and the animated.

Kriesberg’s zoo and barnyard figures project territorial defense. Gagnier’s personages stand by languidly and yearn; Schlesinger’s big vases confront. And Evans’ blobs frolic, sprawl, curl or nap.

We could also with profit look at how each artist uses color: Kriesberg, deftly or hardly at all (“It’s a chunk of clay and shouldn’t be disguised at all”); Gagnier’s waxy “patinas” invent new flesh tones; Schlesinger’s flat colors are deployed quite boldly; whereas Evans goes for subtle and satiny.

Nevertheless, clay is the subject that must be addressed head-on.

Because of the histories and the other contexts involved, part of the game here is to avoid the other c-words (craft and ceramics), which tend to pull works of clay into a discourse the artists here do not support. Not only do these four artists intend to make sculpture, they all hail from non-craft backgrounds and exhibit in non-craft venues.

Admittedly, the material comes with a lot of baggage; anything made of clay can be seen as pointing to everything else made of clay. This usually means the utilitarian vessel. The figurine is another ancient use of clay, but is also irrelevant here, as are bricks and tiles. Can we strip clay of all these denotations and even the unconscious connotations? That is the gamble if you play with clay.

Oops! We have to eliminate the play school too. And can we, even if we want to, remove clay from its earthiness, from referencing its source? From the yucky-sublime? Clay is so pliable. Or from another angle, it’s God’s dough.

And while we are at it, when exactly did clay in our culture’s sculpture become anything but a step towards bronze, and instead a worthy material in itself? My theory is that clay in full-blown sculpture is new. My own personal data bank only yields Ruben Nakian, Mary Frank and (sometimes) Nathan Oliveira. And dare I mention Pablo Picasso?

There is still a lot left to explore. Each of the artists in the current exhibition differ in how he uses his chosen material. The artworks form a tactile spectrum, as it were, from rough expressionism (Kriesberg), to bravado finesse (Gagnier), to hand-built dead-pan flatness (Schlesinger), to silky-smooth and marble-like (Evans).

We could also look at the work from the point of view of what it is not. Although each sculpture offered is made of clay, none are tchatskas or whimsies. This is another reason why they are not c---t or c------s, for, alas, this is increasingly how these formerly glorious arenas have been subsumed. In contrast, sculptural ambition creates its own aura, and although sculpture does not necessarily exclude tabletop scale, delight or wit, for the most part it excludes silliness.

What we have here is another way of looking at clay. Could this presage a re-ordering of clay’s place in art? If so, then issues such as reference, cross-reference, figuration vs. abstraction, vessel vs. statue will, as this exhibition proves, need to be on the agenda.