Bamboos grow endlessly, straight as spindles, useless as religious thoughts; their perfect forests are poetic thoughts, harmonious sounds of flutes, or organ pipes in cathedrals.
Bamboo precedes and guides us towards a rich and orderly world, without ever deceiving our search for uselessness.
An infinite architecture that crosses through our eyes and ears.
— Andrea Branzi
Andrea Branzi [Italian, 1938-2023] Lamp (Bamboo Leaves), 2022
Japanese rice paper, bamboo leaves, patinated aluminum and black bamboo
85.5 x 29.5 x 30 inches
217 x 75 x 76 cm
Edition of 12
Wendell Castle was always reaching out, in his forms and in his mind, and Squid Chair with Table literally diagrams this impulse. Its most unusual feature, a trio of tentacle-like legs curling upward from the base, bestows the composition with a curious, exploratory air. Together with the contours of the seat and integral tabletop, these tendril-like elements make the piece a compressed masterpiece of complex curvatures. Castle made only one other Squid Chair (the other, also made in cherry wood in 1966, lacks the table element), but they relate to other early works at various scales, in which he explored serpentine forms as a way to extend his compositions out into space. These light, draftsmanly touches counterbalance the monumental massing made possible by his breakthrough stack-lamination technique. Squid Chair with Table is a unique example of how he handled these contrasting aspects of his rapidly developing vocabulary. It shows his remarkable capacity to generate perfectly resolved forms, even as he was in high-speed pursuit of his own imagination, wherever it led him.
Wendell Castle [American, 1932-2018]
Squid Chair with Table, 1966 Cherry
35.75 x 62.5 x 27.5 inches
91 x 159 x 70 cm
John Chamberlain was a poet before he was a sculptor. He attended Black Mountain College in 195556 – near the end of the school’s run, though it was still a vital gathering place for the American avant garde. He then went to New York, where he began making sculptures from scrap metal. Ballantine is among these very early works. It contains, in its compressed and powerful form, so much that was to come.
It is commonplace to call Chamberlain an Abstract Expressionist. He was part of their circle – a regular attendee of the infamous drinking sessions at the Cedar Tavern – and felt particularly aligned to Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline (both had also been at Black Mountain). Certainly, Ballantine does have a gestural quality; it looks like a set of vigorous brushstrokes in midair.
To see it as a 3D action painting, however, misses much of what makes it so significant. For one thing, his interest in poetry is evident in the work’s phrasing and rhythm: notice how it is arranged into three clear masses (stanzas, as it were), each with complex interior articulation.
The sculpture is also unlike painting in the sheer force of its gestures. Like David Smith, another important influence (and one he referred to repeatedly), Chamberlain derived his shapes organically from the processes required to move steel. Ballantine, like his later, defining works in manipulated and collaged automotive parts, announces itself emphatically as a feat of transmutation. Its constituent parts speak clearly of their industrial origins.
Ballantine - a popular beer brand - also pops up in Jasper Johns’ famous cast bronze ale cans; those were made three years later, in 1960, so this is just a coincidence. There are other connections, though: the work was first exhibited by the pioneering New York City gallerist Martha Jackson, and later owned by the influential dealer Allan Stone. We can be sure that both saw Ballantine for what it was: a touchstone of Chamberlain’s oeuvre, made when he was on the verge of revolutionizing American sculpture.
John Chamberlain [American, 1927-2011]
Ballantine, 1957
Painted Steel
18 x 48 x 10 inches
45.7 x 121.9 x 25.4 cm
The materials I use, whether it’s the cool hardness of basalt or the warmth of wood, each carries its own history and energy. My process is about finding harmony in their contrasts and celebrating the quiet beauty that emerges from these natural forms.
— Byung Hoon Choi
Byung Hoon Choi [Korean, b. 1952]
afterimage of beginning 024-610, 2024
Basalt
24 1/2 x 72 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches
62 x 184 x 62 cm
afterimage of beginning 024-619, 2024
Black urethane on ash, natural stone, aluminum
80 3/4 x 47 1/4 x 18 1/2 inches
205 x 120 x 47 cm
Growing up in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, ceramic artist Andile Dyalvane ‘heard the whisper of the ancestors in the clay.’ Today, this inheritance is reflected throughout his practice. His complex, large-scale ceramic artworks often feature symbolic pictograms and patterns, honoring the traditional practices of the Xhosa people.
Andile Dyalvane [South African, b. 1978]
Rhythms Vase, 2014
White stoneware clay, with stained highlights
40.5 x 18.5 x 18 inches
103 x 47 x 46 cm
Design has been a way for me to dissect and analyze every emotion, every thought, every impression, putting a form to it, test it, touch it, get closer to it. Physically making it to be experienced the way I had experienced it.
17.5 x 12.5 x 11.5 inches
44.5 x 32 x 29.5 cm
Edition of 5
13.5 x 12.5 x 8.25 inches
34 x 32 x 21 cm
Edition of 5
Born in 1979, Joris Laarman is a member of the bridge generation that experienced the workings of an analog world, but also the thrilling new possibilities of the digital. He seeks to unite these two realms, embracing future-facing technology while preserving the invaluable knowledge of the past. Laarman merges apparently opposing forces: the artist’s hand and computational precision, function and ornament, craft and digital fabrication, nature and culture. As technology accelerates, his lab remains on the cutting edge, creating glimpses of possible futures—“physical poems” that reflect layered narratives of a world in transition.
As digitization reshapes our world in dramatic ways and at an ever-increasing pace, new iconography, ornamentation, and perceptions of materiality emerge. Originally conceived as a commissioned robotic installation for the High Museum in Atlanta, the Digital Matter series explores the elusive possibilities of the emergent technology of self-assembling robots—blurring the line between science fiction and reality with intricate digital rococo ornamentation. Its composition from small cubes recalls the graphics of Laarman’s younger days, at a time when digital environments were opportunities for transient escape rather than a dominant infrastructure of life. Inspired by the historic furniture of the eighteenth-century cabinetmaker Abraham Roentgen, Laarman added hidden drawers that reveal themselves like Easter Eggs in a video game.
Joris Laarman [Dutch, b. 1979]
Voxel Round Table 5 mm, 2023
Neodymium, 3D-printed polyamide, stainless steel
27 1/2 x 26 3/4 x 24 1/2 inches
70 x 68 x 62 cm
Edition of 8
The title comes from the poem “Forerunners” by the great American 19th century poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains a line describing “shining trails” which the long tracks of colour in this painting straightway called to mind. Squeezed directly from the tube, the lines strike down or up into the light field of the painting, emphasising the risk and pleasure of what it’s like to make a fresh path for yourself for the first time, and then again just for the experiment and adventure of it. In appearance the lines are rich with analogy - at any one time resembling phenomena of nature and landscape, while remaining simply what they are.
In formal terms the work is anchored by its division into four upright panels to create a broad panorama that feels like a field of possibility. Each panel is again divided horizontally in two with the regular embossing of the previously printed paper giving an underground counter-rhythm that serves to emphasise all the ecstatic play of colour, line and texture at the surface.
— Christopher Le Brun
Christopher Le Brun [British, b.1951]
Forerunners, 2022
Oil on paper on canvas
58 5/8 x 163 3/8 inches
149 x 415 cm
For a placid man, John Mason made a great many spears. The earliest of them dates to 1956, just as he was helping to revolutionize American ceramics. The latest, made in the final decade of his life, are composed of angular planes whirling around a central tilted axis. In between, he made spears that were massive and graphic, colorful and unglazed, compact and monumental. What they have in common is upward thrust, as if they had somehow forced their way through the ground below.
Within this long series, Mason’s 1963 untitled vertical sculpture is in many respects pre-eminent. It is commanding in scale, standing nearly two feet taller than the artist himself. Like all his work of the early 1960s, it is materially assertive, the separate clay chunks and slabs used in its construction left palpably present. Its dark glaze gives it a glowering sheen. In a photograph you might mistake it for cast bronze, but in person you’d never make that mistake; it has the quality of something mined as much as made. At the same time, the sculpture is possessed of a greater clarity than most of Mason’s work of the period, thanks to its stark, slender silhouette.
While Mason did not title the work, it clearly relates to other “Spear Forms” that he had been making since 1960, using the ingeniously simple method of building on to a wooden post, which he removed after the clay hardened. The resulting objects seems to clamber up themselves, in outright defiance of their own weight.
To find models for Mason’s 1963 vertical sculpture, we must look outside of ceramics entirely: preColumbian and African art, Brancusi’s totems, and the attenuated figures of Alberto Giacometti. These influences are there in the work, but it would be difficult to overstate its sheer originality as an encounter with ceramics’ primordial physicality. As Frank Lloyd has noted, “unlike Voulkos, who made his wheel-thrown and assembled sculpture with traditional methods, Mason had no precedent or parallel.”
John Mason [American, 1927-2019]
Untitled Vertical Sculpture, 1963
Glazed ceramic
90 1/2 x 25 x 18 inches
229.9 x 63.5 x 45.7 cm
I like natural materials, reworked and pushed to their limits. Anything that speaks to the tactile beings that we are, made of flesh and bone.
— Raphael Navot
Raphael Navot [Israeli, b. 1977]
Acrostic (Lay-Curve), 2021
Oak, cashmere, silk
33 1/2 x 137 3/4 x 52 3/4 inches
85 x 350 x 134 cm
Edition of 8
31 x 51 /12 x 37 inches
79 x 131 x 94 cm
Edition of 8
Domain Rug, 2024
56% wool & 46% silk
181 x 126 inches
460 x 320 cm
To serve well, you must be truthful. It sounds a bit spiritual, but that is a huge part of the work. Truth comes in well-made functional materials being put together, and it also comes through the signaling and the messaging of what all the materials or color or form or position of the body mean.
— Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross [British, b. 1991]
BIRTH AT DAWN, 2022
Nero Africa granite, glass fiber reinforced concrete, fired OSB, fired honey and milk patina, painted steel, polyurethane
16.5 x 17 x 17.5 inches
42 x 43 x 44.5 cm
Edition of 8
The Italians speak of the Years of Lead (Anni di Piombo), a period of political unrest that began in the late 1960s and lasted two decades. Ettore Sottsass saw it coming. During World War II he had been conscripted into the Italian army, an experience that contributed to his lifelong suspicion of authority.
By 1967, despite his irrepressible instincts, he had established himself as one of the most prominent industrial designers in Italy. (In 1959 he had received the Compasso d’Oro for the country’s first mainframe computer, the Olivetti Elea 9003.) All the while, he maintained a personal creative practice. Ceramics were particularly important to him as a means of exploring his interest in archaic cultures, and capturing the impressions he got on his travels, including revelatory trips to India and California.
It all came together in “Menhir Ziggurat Stupas Hydrants and Gas Pumps,” held at the Sperone Gallery in 1967, known for showing canonical Pop and Arte Povera artists. The exhibition included 21 totems in ceramic, made on the premises of the manufacturer Bitossi. Their titles were joyfully provocative, some proposing that the objects were intended to hold psychedelic drugs, others taking satirical aim at the establishment: Super Chic Urn for the Ashes of Political Parties; Ridiculous Triptych for the Powerful, Bullies, and Moralizers.
Monumento di Merda Alle Patrie (roughly, Crap Monument for the Fatherland) is unusual for its stark black and white palette – most of the group were vividly colored – but it is built in the same way, a stack of hand-thrown forms arranged into a quasi-figural composition. The Sperone exhibition title lists the references that were in Sottsass’s capacious mind: ancient menhirs, or standing stones; stepped ziggurats and stupas; the more mechanical aspect of fire hydrants and gas pumps, accidental totems encountered in the modern streetscape.
Despite its relative simplicity, the work contains all these allusions and more: past and present, spirituality and secularism, bitter satire and ambitious abstraction. Having begun as a mockmonument, it has since become an actual one, to Sottsass’s own irrepressible creative drives.
Ettore Sottsass [Italian, 1917-2007]
Monumento di Merda Alle Patrie, 1966 Ceramic
89.5 x 19.75 x 19.75 inches
227.3 x 50.2 x 50.2 cm
Frank Stella began his career as a painter, and as far as he was concerned, he always remained one. No matter how three-dimensional and elaborate his constructions became, flinging themselves outward from the wall as if detonated, he called them “pictures,” as if to insist that, first and foremost, they are things to be carefully looked at. Lanaken, named for a town in Belgium where he had an artistic residency, is a perfect example of this combined physical and optical experimentation. Unusual in Stella’s oeuvre for its horizontal orientation and compositional density, it could be considered a tribute to John Chamberlain, a lifelong friend, with its crushed aluminum carapace and incorporated car bumper.
Yet it also stages a complex visual play, with overlapping volume and reflectivity acting to dematerialize the form. Though made entirely with analogue means, it has an obvious relationship to the pioneering digital investigations he was conducting at this point in his career. “Virtual space has no ground,” Stella pointed out. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s about destroying the ground so you can explore all the dimensions and viewpoints.” This is a satisfying way to view Lanaken – as a form tumbling free from all fixed coordinates, introducing an incursion of breathtaking possibility into actual space.
Frank Stella [American 1936-2024]
Lanaken, 2011
Aluminum and corian
24 x 44 1/2 x 17 inches
61 x 113 x 43.2 cm
Design has been a way for me to dissect and analyze every emotion, every thought, every impression, putting a form to it, test it, touch it, get closer to it. Physically making it to be experienced the way I had experienced it.
— Faye Toogood
Faye Toogood [British, b. 1977]
Lode II, 2021
Hand-carved Purbeck marble
34.75 x 47.25 x 13 inches
88 x 120 x 33 cm
Edition of 8
