Peter Schlesinger
Untitled
2024
Glazed ceramic
26.5 x 17 x 12 in (67.3 x 43.2 x 30.5 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater
Peter Schlesinger (b. 1948, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York and Bellport. Expanding from a painterly practice to ceramic sculpture in the 1980s, his forms tie together an iconography from antiquity with the development of pottery across temporalities and cultures. His inventions of glazes and textures signals ceramic’s living process, as well as clay’s high sensuality.
The vase’s form imparts a biomorphic character and is covered in spots, a kind of abstract version of octopus ceramics of Greek antiquity. Materially, the ceramic’s blue-green surface harks back to celadon ware, a type of pottery glazed in a jade-green hue that originated in China. Circular motifs are repeated vertically by hand, without prior precise placement, favoring intuition and movement over formal rigidity. These constant decenterings can be read in light of the artist’s own bohemianism, moving between different artistic scenes and documents their figures.
Provenance
Sperone Westwater, New York
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celadon
https://smarthistory.org/octopus-vase
Peter Schlesinger at Tristan Hoare Gallery
Peter Schlesinger, The Language of Vessels, Tristan Hoare Gallery, London, 12 April – 10 May 2024
Peter Schlesinger: France 1969-1979, Mariposa, Paris, October 15, 2023 – November 25, 2023