Peter Voulkos’ Vessels Stack Up as Monumental Gems

The exhibition of recent stoneware vessels by Peter Voulkos at Frank Lloyd Gallery features the sort of work on which the artist established his formidable reputation in the 1950s. Back then, when it signaled such a radical departure from almost every established norm of ceramic art, the work was greeted with stunned amazement. Now it is too, but it’s amazement of a different order--the kind that comes from being in the presence of seemingly effortless artistic mastery. These vessels can make you gulp.

Artistically, Voulkos is a builder. Whether hand-held tea bowls, plates displayed on stands made from steel rebar or monumental vessels, his sculptural objects share a visceral sense of having been constructed, torn down, rebuilt, pulled apart and put together yet again. The elemental associations of the clay medium are acknowledged and exploited, not denied, while clay’s transformative capacity under the intense heat of fire becomes a leitmotif in the building process Voulkos employs.

Every ceramic artist knows that what goes into a kiln looks very different from what comes out, and although what comes out can be controlled to varying degrees, it’s never certain. Uncertainty feels actively courted in Voulkos’ vessels, and this embrace of chance gives them a surprisingly contradictory sense of ease.

Most compelling here are the so-called “stacks.” The chimney-topped shape of these 4-foot-tall vessels loosely recalls a cross between a classical jar and a firing kiln. Voulkos has been making these stacks at least since the 1970s, and as the name implies, they are built from disparate, often unrelated parts that are roughly stacked one atop another.

The stacks have the look of once-sleek vessels that shattered and were put back together, sometimes with pieces salvaged from more than one pot. Like assemblages, they are built from castoffs. The result is monumental clay vessels that, in our digital age of seamless imagery, stubbornly refuse to go away.

Voulkos has mounted each of these monumental works on a small lazy Susan. I suspect the reason is less about making it easy to view the vessel from all sides (how complicated is it to walk around a pedestal?) than about asserting the primacy of the human hand. You must touch the sculpture in order to turn it, engaging in an action that opposes learned behavior. (Don’t touch the art!) The gesture again underscores something elemental.

Critical to the emergence of a significant art scene in Los Angeles in the second half of the 1950s, the 75-year-old artist has lived in Northern California since 1959. This is only his second solo show in an L.A gallery in 30 years. Don’t miss it.

* Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through Dec. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Mapping Experience: German artist Franz Ackermann, whose work in the current Carnegie International in Pittsburgh is among the highlights of that show, makes drawings, watercolors and gouaches that usually carry more visual weight than most paintings many times their size. An exhibition of a dozen examples at Works on Paper Inc. provides a satisfying selection by an unusually gifted young artist.

References to maps and mapping have not been uncommon in postwar art, but none have been quite like Ackermann’s. Born in Bavaria and based in Berlin, a city whose own map has been in considerable flux for quite some time, the 36-year-old artist describes a floating world that feels as fugitive as it is factual.

“TEW 33 (Former Trade Center)” suggests a clotted, claustrophobic field of tall buildings, their flat, modular surfaces recalling abstract paintings. Distinctions between indoors and out disappear, as the outside world become another congested interior (glowing, concentric circles of red, green, orange and yellow jam the nominal sky). Thick, jagged, meandering black lines read at once as dead tree branches, electrical cables and twisted metal superstructures.

The densely packed composition seems to merge an urban landscape with the design of a circuit board, morphing space in the process. Other drawings appear to derive from views seen through the windows of moving vehicles, rooms entered, memories of places traveled to (or anticipated), pictures in newspapers and magazines, or from combinations of all these and more.

Firmly located between abstraction and representation, Ackermann’s drawings share a common vantage point: A viewer feels untethered, as if drifting through an ambiguous, liquid landscape that is by turns threatening, gorgeous, confusing, witty and absurd. With a sense of assurance that makes you trust him as your guide, the artist is ingeniously mapping contemporary experience.

* Works on Paper Inc., 6150 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (213) 962-9675, through Jan. 8. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Full of Emptiness: The centerpiece of Jeff Price’s exhibition at Newspace Gallery is a stack of flattened cardboard boxes, maybe 8 feet tall, piled on a small wheeled cart. Resting atop this makeshift “pedestal” of urban detritus is a hollow organic form of translucent white fiberglass.

The swollen, reclining object is like a discarded chrysalis or cocoon. (Part female torso, part male phallus, the fiberglass shape loosely recalls Brancusi.) Both the cardboard pedestal, made from old packing boxes, and its enigmatic, vessel-like object seem poised for disposal, empty shells ready to be wheeled away.

“Lubber,” as this compelling sculpture is titled, is an allegory of birth (or even rebirth) whose poignancy comes from the powerful sense of absence it portrays. Price attempts the same effect with more classically figurative sculptures of hollow, pregnant female torsos, but the poetic allusiveness of “Lubber” is more resonant.

Ironically, so is a group of seven small abstract paintings nearby. Thickly painted in deep green, indigo, white or pink on heavy canvas, they give tangible material heft to images of emptiness. In each painting a centralized lozenge shape visually oscillates between solid and void, doorway and door, presence and absence. The group is titled “Lingam,” the Sanskrit word for “token” that functions as a phallic sign in worship of the Hindu god, Siva.

* Newspace Gallery, 5241 Melrose Ave., (323) 469-9353, through Dec. 11. Closed Sunday and Monday.

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Geological Surveys: The glossy color Cibachromes in the three-person show at Richard Heller Gallery all do odd things with scale. In this way, each travels well-trod ground, exploiting the camera as a handy tool for deceit.

The muddy, organic oozes in Lee Stoetzel’s “Sea Trees” series initially appear to be aerial views of alluvial river deltas or arid deserts, until a stray piece of seaweed or broken shell suddenly zooms your perspective from far to near. These are in fact close-ups of receding tides at the beach.

Kim Keever begins with fabricated miniature landscapes focused on an erupting volcano, which results in a photograph of explosive natural flux as a conceit built wholly from artifice. The best of the three shows an enigmatic double view--the lower half a verdant jungle landscape, the upper a glimpse of the volcano’s cone peeking through a snowy crust--establishing a fantasy of geological time.

The two interiors by Lois Renner display an artist’s studio where things quickly go awry: A step ladder looks too flimsy to use, a huge sponge is stuck to the ceiling, a stroke of paint on a stretched canvas appears to have been made with a colossal brush. Like Keever’s volcanoes, these rooms are miniatures. Portraying the working world of an artist as a mediated stage set has possibilities, although here it doesn’t go much beyond establishing the subject.

* Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Dec. 30. Closed Sunday and Monday.