Spotted | Armory Highlights – Nail Polish + Pearls, Golden Craters and More!

NEW YORK — Welcome back to Spotted, our weekly roundup of various contemporary ceramic works and art commanding our attention. This week we’re highlighting some of our favorite eye-catching works from The Armory Show (New York, March 2 – March 5, 2017). New York’s premiere art fair brings together over 200 of the most influential galleries from 30 countries for discovering and collecting the world’s most important artworks from established masters of the early 20th century to the next generation of emerging artists.

Above image: Théo Mercier, memento mori, 2016, Tire, wood, amphora. 74 4/5 × 11 4/5 × 15 7/10 inches. Offered by Bugada & Cargnel 

Let’s begin with Jun Kaneko’s mesmerizing, expansive installation piece.

Jun Kaneko

Kaneko’s nine-panel Mirage was part of the first annual Platform section, which focused on large-scale works, installations, and site-specific pieces across the show’s industrial space in Piers 92 and 94. Mirage served as the inaugural installation of the new VIP Lounge now located on Pier 92.

Explore more of Cfile’s musings on Kaneko’s work.

Giorgio Morandi

Late Italian painter and printmaker Giorgio Morandi’s still life showcases ordinary household objects transforming them into a compositional experiment.

Per Kirkeby

Artsy writes geologist-turned artist Per Kirkeby’s brick works often reflect his scientific roots.

Kirkeby creates expressive, heavily layered paintings, which can resemble geological strata, the Danish landscape, and even the female form. “The role of art is to accept that things break down,” he says, “That’s the only way to get something new to emerge.”

 Caroline Achaintre

Lucio Fontana

In response to the Contemporary Art Auction at Dorotheum (Vienna, November 25, 2015), in which several of Fontana’s works were available, Garth Clark wrote:

The smooth, “satin” golden surface is disrupted by a hole at its centre – a crater emerging from the silent matter which, in Fontana’s hands, seems to be alive and boil like magma in perpetuity…The experience of sculpture is a salient moment, perhaps the most noteworthy, in Lucio Fontana’s artistic career. His adventure in sculpture is characterised by a constant syncretism between figurative expression and abstract investigation that was probably his true stylistic signature.

Check out more of Cfile’s reflections on Fontana’s work.

Kathy Butterly

Butterly’s vessels exude eroticism with their gapping, dripping mouths rimmed with her ever-present strands of pearls. From Garth Clark:

This fetish jewelry with a thousand sexual connotations is, as I once said when interviewing Butterly in front of a (shocked) Philadelphia audience, is as much a sexual toy as the dildo….It is liberating to feel her libidinal empowerment as a woman. She is not coy about this. The projection of eros in the art is funky, frank, open, pleasure-seeking and persistent, blending seamlessly with liquid sensuality of her medium.

Butterly’s artist biography from Tabor de Nagy:

New York based artist Kathy Butterly brings a painterly sensibility to her idiosyncratic ceramic sculptures. To realize her witty, quirky and inventive fired forms, she applies a range of sophisticated glazes and delicate textures. For Butterly the kiln is a crucible of possibilities. With each firing, a playful intuitive sensory dialogue ensues. Over decades she has mastered teasing out highly associative meaning with each additional glazing. Her aesthetic synthesizes Asian ceramics and California Funk.

See more works by Butterly and check out our musings on her work.

Théo Mercier

 

Newcomer Theo Mercier’s ‘mise en scène’ work explores the reimagining of history like vestiges of a time before, writes Liberation Daily.

Everything here is very bright but everything is done to chill. Because it smells of nostalgia and anxiety. As if one were discovering a silent world about to be devastated.

The work is part of a series from Mercier’s first solo exhibition The Thrill is Gone at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Marseille, France, September 2016 – January 2017).

Explore more of Mercier’s work.

Do you love or loathe these works of art and contemporary ceramic art from The Armory Show? Let us know in the comments.