Viola Frey Sculptures

Viola Frey Hand Sculpture stoneware 12 x 9 x 6" 1983 Viola Frey (1933 - 2004) was born in 1933 in Lodi, California, and died in Oakland, California, in 2004. In 1965 Frey began teac...

"Figure Study H" is exemplary of Viola Frey's colorful, larger-than-life ceramic sculptures. These brash and richly colored figures depict a woman sitting and a man moving away. Frey’s sculptures typically represent men in suits and ties, and women old-fashioned brightly colored dresses. She also depicted women holding a globe, thus empowering them. The men with confused faces are sometimes standing or falling. Viola Frey was born in Lodi, California in 1933. She was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She received a BFA in 1956 from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where she studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Vernon "Corky" Coykendall and Charles Fiske. Her fellow students included Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira. After receiving her bachelor's degree, she attended graduate school at Tulane University and studied with Mark Rothko and George Rickey. She left Tulane in 1957 without receiving her master's degree and moved to New York to work with ceramicist Katherine Choy at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York. Frey returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1960. Along with Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos, Frey reshaped and defined the use of ceramics as a fine art medium through her robust sculptures. Frey was one of a number of California artists working in clay in the 1950s and 60s who turned away from that medium's conventions to produce works with robust sculptural qualities associated with Abstract Expressionist painting, Pop art and what would come to be known as California Funk. In the 1970s, after moving to a larger studio in Oakland, Frey started creating her signature larger-than-life ceramic figures. Standing up to twelve feet high and constructed of separate pieces, the massive men appear in generic suits and ties, while the large female figures are often depicted in heavily patterned, 1950s-style dresses. In 1979, Viola was included in "A Century of Ceramics in the United States 1878-1978", which Garth Clark co-organized with Margie Hughto...

Artist : Viola Frey Title : Untitled (Portrait of a Woman with Hat Charger, Platter) Materials : ceramic, glazes Date : 1988 Dimensions :...

Provenance- Originally purchased thru the Greenberg Gallery in St. Louis. Sissy Thomas of Okun/Thomas Gallery contacted Dorothy Weiss Gallery (who represented Viola at the time) an...