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The first exhibition of 2010 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, 520 West 27th Street, will be
ceramic sculptures, including monumental figures as well as bricolage groupings, and
works on paper by Viola Frey, entitled: “Every Man, Every Woman: the Figures of Viola
Frey.” The exhibition opens on January 7th and continues to February 20th.
The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, will
also host a solo exhibition of Frey’s work entitled
“Bigger, Better, More,” opening on January 26th and
continuing through May 2nd. This exhibition was
co-organized by the Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin
and the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Ontario, and is
accompanied by a book of the same name,
published by Hudson Hills Press.
Frey loved and celebrated the human figure in overscale
proportions throughout her oeuvre, drawing
from the model in the studio, squeezing pieces of
clay and transform-ing the moist clumps into giant
sculptures of every man,
every woman. Her largerthan-
life men and women are
ordinary, thinking, reflective
beings that gaze out at the
world, their faces revealing
an inner life marked and
lined by matters of
consequence. In their heroic scale they transport the viewer to a
time when everything was larger than life itself, the innocent
child peering upwards.
This sense of wonder pervades all of Frey’s work. “Stubborn
Woman, Orange Hands” is dressed pertly in her pink birthday
suit. She sits upright, supported by her huge orange hands,
looking into space, confident of her stature, unabashed by her
curves and golden streaked tresses styled in ‘50s fashion. She is a
symbol of the artist’s philosophy that man is more powerful in
his blue power suit and woman more powerful in her birthday
suit! Echoing this philosophy is “Standing White Majestic Man,”
Frey’s final sculpture, created just before she died in 2004. For
the first time, the artist decided to include in an exhibition three
major pieces glazed in white, thus focusing on the beauty of
form, undiluted by the joy of her palette. Standing with arm
outstretched, this every man beckons with one hand, while his
other is perched on his hip. No longer a symbol of power,
and/or intimidation, every man has become a sympathetic
personality. Realizing this stance with arm outstretched was the
artist’s final feat of engineering in a medium not typically associated with monumental
sculpture.
In “Bigger, Better, More,” Davira Taragin writes:
“Frey is best known for her gigantic figures. Not only does Frey reveal her early
involvement in painting in the dynamic color glazes of the surfaces of these
ceramic sculptures, but she also proves to be a perceptive observer of gender and
power issues as they were played out specifically in mid-20th century America.”
“World Culture Bricolage,” a
grouping of smaller figures and
figurines exemplifies
the artist’s love of the figure
clothed in period dresses and suits,
and her passion for collecting and
slip casting mass-produced
ceramic figurines she found at flea
markets in Oakland and San
Francisco. She considered the
figurines abstractions of
contemporary society when
removed from the context of
people’s homes. Over the years,
Frey built a collection of hundreds of ceramic figurines, which she housed on shelves in
a closet in her home, a kind of mini-museum of source material. Among the cascading
figurines in “World Culture,” are a bust of a Native American, a red rooster, hands
(casts of the artist’s hands), a kindled candle, a tiny football player, a Wedgewood lass,
and myriad other images that create a symphonic flow of energy, color and life.
Works on paper in gouache, charcoal, pastel, oil and
acrylic further depict Frey’s personal approach to the
human figure, particularly a series of
gouache/charcoal works with unclothed men and
women, the artist’s own “Adam and Eve.” Though
drawn from the model, these figures might be
sculptures in large scale as their bodies are reduced to
basic outline and shapes, not details that personalize.
Like her sculptures, the works on paper are joyful in
palette filled with the brio of an artist who relished
drawing as much as sculpting, relished abstracting
forms with color in two dimension as well as three
dimension.
In “Bigger, Better, More,” Patterson Sims writes of the
artist’s works on paper:
“Frey’s paintings and big pastels most
audaciously display her concepts of space
and human interaction. They evoke the
density, jumble and clutter of her Oakland house and backyard, and to a lesser
degree the expanse and clutter of her West Oakland studio/storage space. These
boisterous works overflow with figures
World Culture Bricolage, 1999, ceramic, 31 x 64 x 18 inches
and figurines that cannot be differentiated, behaving in ways that cannot be
explained.”
Frey’s love of the figure in all its shapes permeates her drawings and sculpture.
Unconcerned about conventional beauty, the artist embraced the human form in
sculptures up to twelve feet high and filled the field of each of her drawings from top
to bottom of the paper.
The artist’s work has been widely shown throughout the country at the Albany Museum
of Art, Georgia; Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Alaska; The Arkansas Arts
Center, Little Rock; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; Avampato Discovery
Museum, Charleston, West Virginia; Bayly Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia;
Brevard Museum of Art and Science, Melbourne, Florida; The Butler Institute of
American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington,
North Carolina; Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida; Chicago Public Library
Cultural Center, Illinois; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dahl Fine Arts
Center, Rapid City, South Dakota; DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park, Lincoln,
Massachusetts; Fresno Museum of Art, California; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton,
New Jersey; Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Hudson River Museum,
Yonkers, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Kreeger Museum,
Washington, D.C.; Madison Art Center, Wisconsin; Marion Koogler McNay Art
Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; Montgomery Museum
of Fine Arts, Alabama; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Arts and
Sciences, Macon, Georgia; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of Ceramic
Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor
Cultural Center, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Oakland
Museum of Art, California; Pewabic Pottery, Detroit; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona;
Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Queens Museum, New York; St. Louis Museum of Art,
Missouri; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Santa Barbara Museum,
California; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Smithsonian Institution, Renwick Gallery,
Washington, D.C.; Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,
Richmond; Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham; Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York; Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas; among
others; and abroad at the American Center, Paris; Hall du Centre National des Arts
Plastiques, Paris, Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and in Japan at Daimaru
Museum of Art, Osaka-Umeda; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Isetan
Museum of Art, Tokyo; LaForet Museum, Koto-ku, Tokyo; The Museum of Ceramic Art,
Hyogo; The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga.
Viola Frey’s work is represented in numerous public collections, among them; The
Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; The
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Louise Wells Cameron Art
Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The
Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Everson
Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia;
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Long Beach Museum
of Art, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Minnesota; Mobile
Museum of Art, Alabama; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Museum of Arts
and Sciences, Macon, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Norton
Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Oakland Museum, California; Orange County
Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Palm Springs Art Museum, California;
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Racine Art Museum, Wisconsin; The Saint
Louis Art Museum, Missouri; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; San
Jose Museum of Art, California; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; J.B. Speed Art
Museum, Louisville; Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas.
Abroad, her work is included in the collections of Manufacture de Sevres, Paris;
Museum Bellrive, Zurich and The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga, Japan.
Viola Frey was born in Lodi, California in 1933; she died in 2004. She attended Tulane
University and received a B.F.A. and an Honorary Doctorate from California College of
Arts and Crafts, Oakland. She was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowships, and received the Award of Honor in Sculpture from the Arts Commission
of San Francisco, as well as numerous other grants and awards.
This exhibition has been organized in conjunction with the Artists’ Legacy Foundation,
Oakland, California.
For additional information and/or photographs, please call 212-966-6676 or e-mail
Nancy Hoffman Gallery at info@nancyhoffmangallery.com.
Yours sincerely,
Nancy Hoffman
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