Recent Work

The exuberant and spontaneous ceramic artwork of Betty Woodman takes many different forms, from towering vases to wall murals, from triptychs of thrown and glazed ceramics to delicate small porcelains. In a major one-person exhibit presented throughout the Frank Lloyd Gallery, Woodman will show her colorful and painterly ceramic sculpture during the month of September. Works will range in scale and complexity, from editions produced at La Manufacture Nationale De Sevres, France to recent large-scale wall assemblage pieces.

Woodman’s well-known work often uses imagery derived from the garden, depicting floral patterning in combination with textile design. However, her presentation is anything but simple, in that dimensionality and functionality are called into question. Woodman’s treatment of the surface decoration takes into consideration the examples of painters such as Bonnard and Matisse. However, by exploding and de-constructing the supporting elements of her work, she creates wall-relief assemblage and murals.

Woodman has long been recognized as one of the major figures in ceramic sculpture. Betty Woodman’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris among others.

The September show will be Betty Woodman’s first one-person show in Los Angeles since 1984. The exhibition will be held in conjunction with several shows at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica. Critic and curator Michael Duncan has assembled a series of shows, starting with a retrospective of works by Kim MacConnel, shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. A re-examination of the New York Pattern and Decoration movement will be shown at the Shoshanna Wayne Gallery. Concurrent exhibits include Los Angeles Pattern and Decoration at Rosamund Felsen Gallery and Robert Zakanitch at Patricia Faure Gallery.