The ceramics revival over the past decade or so has in many ways been more reboot than renaissance. This means that, in service of this quest, many cool young artists have skipped back to pottery’s Play-Doh DNA, creating the kind of clumsy naive things we might have brought home to Mom from kindergarten. The less educated and refined the better—much of it seems intent on declaring, “I don’t know anything about pottery; I’m just having fun.” On behalf of those who have a deeper sense of the craft’s long, important, and complicated history, I am glad you had fun. Here’s your warm milk and animal crackers. It’s nap time.
In contrast, the discreetly munificent flowering of one of contemporary art’s most talented ceramic artists, Elisabeth Kley, comes as both a welcome breeze and a puzzlement. Who is this woman flouting today’s potter-house rules and making seductive, intriguing work that seems to have not an MFA in irony but a Ph.D. in history? The question attended her splendid spring show at Canada in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, as well as at other recent exhibitions at New York’s Gordon Robichaux and Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, the latter an institutional presentation that traveled to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha.
With an ever-palpating grasp on the dizzying carousel of pattern of the past four thousand years, Kley has developed her own kind of motif Esperanto, tearing leaves from myriad sources such as ancient Egyptian friezes; Etruscan, Coptic, and Islamic symbology; pre-Columbian ur-modern figures; the electric geometries of the Wiener Werkstätte; the folksy cheer of midcentury ceramics by Roger Capron and Stig Lindberg; and the retro-Deco drawings and stage designs of Edward Gorey, to name but a few. Her singular art is a little bit gnostic, a little bit Frank Stella, with a smattering of medieval Persia and a dash of Gucci.
Her show at Canada, “A Seat in the Boat of the Sun,” was a precis of the Kley mystique, one that evinced an ambitous expansion of her ceramic forms. Using her favorite colors—a range of blue-blacks on a cream-white ground—the artist created a sort of theatrical set that recalled the occult shenanigans of the theosophist movement that flourished during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (At the moment, comeback kid Hilma af Klint is theosophy’s most famous exponent; Kandinsky and Mondrian both worked with its relation of abstraction to higher consciousness.)
Like them, Kley excels at making her own quasi-religion and culture, summoning her own idiosyncratic deities. (The show would have been perfect for a séance—Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, are you there?) Placing her architectural ceramics and handpainted geometric patterns directly onto the gallery’s walls or on wall-mounted canvas screens, the Canada exhibition expressed this idea exceptionally. Kley took her own skill at hand-building earthenware slabs to a new level, forming large totemic pieces that ranged from simple cubic shapes to arch segments, bringing to mind the most fabulous expression possible of the iconic unit blocks so popular in kindergartens everywhere a couple of generations ago. One pharaonic, Vasarely-inflected totem, Vessel Interrupted by Emptiness, 2023, cleverly hints at the arbitrary line between design and art: In a “useful” vase, the firing hole is at the top so the object can be properly utilized. But in this sculpture, the opening is out of sight, on its bottom, rendering it a solid-looking and “useless” aesthetic object. Snake, 2022, a semi-sinuous chain of five discrete blocks, brings the fascinating zoological principle of aposematism (or warning coloration) into Kley’s field of reference. The work makes it seem as though she’s linking the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur to the menagerie of stuffed reptiles in New York’s Natural History Museum—right up Cleopatra’s alley.
Kley’s building blocks suggest that she can channel a bit of child’s play herself, and honestly, who among us cannot? But in the end, what was so charming about Kley’s presentation here—and her work in general—was not just her enthusiastic devouring of millennia of decoration and pattern, but the light, restrained, yet unpredictable way she plucks shapes and symbols out of her cerebral archive to create new keys to her culture, taking a cosmetic approach to the cosmic. And what embodies great art if not that?
— David Colman