Tony Brown

untitled

2019

Hand-built clay sculpture with white glaze and internal blue LED light. This sculpture can be wall mounted or displayed on a pedestal or table top.

Peter Voulkos Ceramic Sculptural Dish, ca. 1985 Sculpted ceramic Hand-signed by artist, Incised signature on the base. 1.5 x 11.5 inches This charger plate by Voulkos features a Greek-influenced stylized birds and leaf design. Peter Voulkos is an American artist of Greek descent. The abstraction of animal and nature elements paired with the earthy, mottled gray and brown against brown background make this work beautiful. This work was featured in the exhibition "On Black Mountain: The Bauhaus Legacy in America", at the Sager Braudis Gallery (now Sager Reeves), in Columbia Missouri from April 5, 2019 to April. 27, 2019 and is reproduced in page 53 of the exhibition catalogue. We will provide a complimentary copy of the exhibition catalogue to the buyer of this work. Born in 1924 to Greek immigrant parents in the town of Bozeman, Montana, Peter Voulkos is one of America’s most significant sculptors of the 20th century. Voulkos got his start in art in the late 1940s, when he was studying at Montana State College, Bozeman on the G.I. Bill, after being drafted and serving as an airplane armorer-gunner in the Pacific in World War II. In classes with Frances Senska, he discovered ceramics, the medium that would characterize his career. After graduating from Montana State College, Bozeman in 1951, Voulkos moved west and earned his MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. Returning to Montana after graduation, Voulkos attracted attention “as a prodigious natural potter and a producer of elegantly thrown functional earthenware,” according to Roberta Smith for the New York Times. He also produced dinnerware to sell through high-quality stores, and was noted for his wax-resist method of decoration.Voulkos gained a reputation as a master of ceramics techniques, winning twenty-nine prizes and awards from 1949 through 1955. However, a summer spent teaching at the experimental Black Mountain College (he was invited to teach at BMC by Karen Karnes) near Asheville, North Carolina in 1953 resulted in a dramatic shift in Voulkos’s artistic priorities, as well as his aesthetic. It was at Black Mountain College that Voulkos met Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Charles Olson. He then visited New York City (as a guest of pianist David Tudor and Mary Catherine Richards) and encountered Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline—Abstract Expressionist painters who influenced the new direction Voulkos would go on to pursue. In 1954, Voulkos was invited to teach at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis), and he established a new ceramics department and graduate program that attracted other young artists including John Mason, Ken Price, Billy Al Bengston and Paul Soldner. It was here that, inspired by the scale and spontaneity of the New York School, Voulkos began to build progressively larger works that cast aside utility and abandoned ceramic conventions. Decoration became aggressive, as he slashed at and pierced the clay, which he then energetically painted with glaze. Peter Voulkos exhibited these new works in shows at the Landau Gallery in Los Angeles, which announced to the world a new way of approaching ceramics. Disagreements with the more conservative administrators of the LA County Art Institute led to Voulkos’s departure for the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. While at Berkeley, Voulkos experimented with bronze and produced large-scale bronze sculpture, while continuing his ceramic work and doing demonstrations of ceramics throughout the U.S. In 1979, a young ceramist named Peter Callas...

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