| About the Exhibitions
Opening reception for Kathy Butterly & Jill Bonovitz and
Betty Woodman: First Friday, April 2, 5:30 - 7:30 pm
Kathy Butterly and Jill Bonovitz
Kathy Butterly’s
small-scale ceramic sculpture - all of the pieces are between
5 and 8 inches tall - are remarkable for their intense humanity,
vivid glazes and daring manipulations of clay. Each piece
offers unexpected flashes of human, landscape and/or Art Deco
inspired forms; they are playful but also challenging, using
a breakthrough approach. Curators and writers have linked
her work to that of George Ohr, Robert Arneson and Ron Nagle.
Her animated ceramics defy convention with their heavily
ornamented, folded and curvy layers. The 6 works on view each
offer alternate readings - both as vessels and as abstract
sculpture. With a sculpture/vase like Garter, the voluptuous
folds and bands of glazed “braid” read like a
zaftig blond doing the shimmy.
Jill Bonovitz’s formal concerns with
clay have consistently followed a spare, linear aesthetic.
Her porcelain vessels are formed by chance combinations of
thrown sections with sculpted additions (often coils or discs
or nipples). Her work is informed by ethnographic textiles,
primitive drawing and forms from nature. Throughout the last
fifteen years, Bonovitz has worked separately in wire and
earthenware but has repeatedly focused on porcelain, roughly
8 inches high and with muted, monochromatic glazes.
Bonovitz has shown frequently in Philadelphia and New York.
A graduate of Columbia University and Moore College of Art
and Design, her work is in such museums as the Museum of Arts
and Design, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Stedelijk Museum.
Kathy Butterly and Jill Bonovitz is one
of 95 exhibitions that are part of INDEPENDENCE: The 44th
Annual National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts
(NCECA) conference taking place in Philadelphia from March
31 to April 3, 2010. The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA is
serving as the onsite liaison and organizing body of the exhibitions
program. For a complete list of programmed exhibitions, visit:
www.theclaystudio.org
Betty Woodman
Locks Gallery is pleased to present Betty Woodman,
an exhibition of new and recent ceramic works, one of the
95 exhibitions that are part of INDEPENDENCE: The 44th Annual
National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA)
conference.
Internationally-acclaimed artist Betty Woodman (b.1930) creates
conceptual vessels in clay, and paintings with sculptural
ornamentation that suggest architectural vignettes. Throughout
a long and distinguished career, she has repeatedly referenced
art history, the decorative arts, and draws from such diverse
sources as Greek and Roman vases, Roman frescoes, Matisse,
Bonnard and Korean painting.
For her Locks Gallery exhibit, Woodman will be showing two
recent bodies of work. In her series, Vases Upon Vases,
ceramic vessels sit atop wood constructions that mimic vessels
and echo or comment on the actual ceramics. The second series
of life-sized ‘Rooms’ are sculptural assemblages
that unite painting on canvas with ceramic vessels and ceramic
flourishes created in low relief. Together these two series
celebrate the implied or latent theatrical aspect of much
architecture and sculpture. That spirit mirrors the artist’s
philosophical approach to art.
The Locks Gallery exhibition precedes Woodman’s installation
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this spring. At the museum,
Woodman will exhibit implied wall and relief constructions
inspired by the 18th-century English period room at the museum,
the Lansdowne Drawing room.
John Moore, Shades of Gray
Locks Gallery is pleased to present Shades of Gray,
an exhibition of new drawings by John Moore. . A fully illustrated
catalogue with an essay by Dr. Paul Galvez accompanies the
exhibit.
This exhibition, John Moore’s first exclusive drawing
show, is composed of eighteen charcoal works, all completed
in 2009. An ambitious endeavor into a medium that the artist
had only previously handled while in college, these large-scale
drawings each have a unique subject and are not studies or
preparatory drawings for paintings.
Seeking a break from painting, his sole pursuit over the
last decade and the focus of a mid-career retrospective in
2009, the artist was drawn to a total immersion in a new medium.
Charcoal’s flexibility and variety of hues enhances
the depth of field and the articulation of architectural forms
- longstanding hallmarks of Moore’s work. The density
of the heavily worked charcoal achieves a surface richness
akin to painting. Each work also reveals Moore’s own
analytic approach to the urban landscape and architecture
- lifelong interests.
Moore served as chair of the Fine Arts Department at The
University of Pennsylvania from 1999 through 2008, capping
off a distinguished teaching career at Tyler School of Art,
Boston University and PENN. The artist has shown extensively
in New York and Philadelphia, in museum and gallery exhibitions,
and his work is in the collections of the Art Institute of
Chicago; Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; SFMOMA and Yale University
Art Gallery.
About the Gallery - Member of the Old City Arts Association
Founded in 1968, Locks Gallery represents an international group of critically respected contemporary artists working in a wide variety of disciplines. The gallery exhibition program presents new works by mid-career artists while introducing the work of emerging artists to a national audience. Survey and thematic exhibitions of work by essential artists of the 20th-century including Louise Bourgeois, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson and George Segal, are regular highlights of the gallery exhibition program. Organized by the gallery working in concert with the artist and/or their estate, these exhibitions offer an opportunity to view an insightful selection of rarely seen works in a museum quality setting. |
