Opening Reception: Saturday, March 19, 2011, 5:00 to 7:00pm
Recapitulando marks, for the artist Gustavo Pérez, a summation of his work. The Mexican ceramist, who has been exhibiting internationally since 1976, has developed several themes in his ceramic sculpture. This exhibition provides a retrospective look at those series, and presents over 48 works to the Los Angeles audience. Significant large scale pieces are included along with Gustavo Pérez's more familiar vessels, resulting in a complete range of scale and form.
This will be the seventh solo exhibition of Perez's work at the gallery. Two large scale examples of his work are included in this show, Triangulo and Tablero. The installation piece Triangulo is composed of dozens of small cylinders, cut at a precise angle and placed face-to-face in opposition. The sculpture forms an equilateral triangle, and though it is based in geometry alludes simultaneously to minimal art and optical illusion. Tablero is a wall relief, composed of 49 small abstract forms. Although the individual pieces are made by straightforward folding and forming of the clay, the resulting image has a primitive presence.
As he ventures into the sculptural realm, where the larger vessels have greater reference to the corporeal or organic, there is a remarkable ability to control the medium and to work within its physical properties. He also makes dimensional constructions, a kind of blending of wall relief sculpture and physical drawing in clay, which explore the ideas of branching, abstract patterning, and linear progression. Here, too, Pérez presents clarity of vision, adept execution, and a sense of grace and natural elegance.
Mexican ceramist Gustavo Pérez makes vessels that are simple, smooth and symmetrical. Their elegance is derived from the precision of the incised lines and other graceful markings on the pots. While using the same clay body--sand colored stoneware--throughout his work, the artist achieves a wide range of form and pattern and includes slowly undulating walls beneath the subtly incised surfaces. The ceramics of Gustavo Pérez are distinguished by eliminating superfluous details and by synthesis of his elements. Pure in form and without specific associations, his language of line and the definition of the vessel mark his work as a distinctive voice. The form is not just a container or a receptacle; it is architecture. The work is also a support for drawings, which are at once ancient and modern, mechanical and lyrical.
Gustavo Pérez was born in Mexico City in 1950, and studied engineering, mathematics and philosophy before he began his involvement with ceramics. Over the past thirty years, he has received the honor of two retrospective exhibitions in his native country. The first retrospective was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 1999. Then, in 2005, Pérez was honored with another retrospective at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City.
Please click here to view the digital catalogue for the exhibition on an iPad:|