Painting in the Dark: An encounter between intention and chance. Curated by Glenn Adamson and Kathy Butterly

Curated by Glenn Adamson and Kathy Butterly, Painting in the Dark brings together seven artists, spanning more than a century, who exemplify a painterly approach to the ceramic medium. Participating artists include Hugh Robertson (1845-1908), Rudolf Staffel (1911-2002), Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011), Rose Cabat (1914-2015), Tony Marsh (b. 1954), Marit Tingleff (b. 1954), and Kathy Butterly (b. 1963). 

Ceramics is, among other things, a means of painting in three dimensions. It affords possibilities of polychrome, mark-making, and layering, just like oil or acrylic on canvas. Yet there’s an important difference for ceramic artists: they do not see the finished surface, the effects of glazes and other materials in combination, until their work is fired in the kiln. This technical feature of the medium – a hiatus between the application of color and its realization – means that painting, in ceramic, is always to some degree a matter of chance operations.

Painting in the Dark explores this fascinating aspect of the ceramic medium: the relationship between intention and accident. As Adamson highlights in his curatorial essay that accompanies the exhibition:

Anecdotally, the wonderful phrase ‘painting in the dark’, the title for the exhibition, is owed to Martha Russo, the Denver-based artist and a former apprentice of Toshiko Takaezu. Russo, in turn, got it from her colleague Bruce Price, a painter who was experimenting with ceramics for the first time, which felt to him like ‘painting in a dark closet'.

While each of the artists in this exhibition embodies a painterly approach to this art form, their sensibilities range from the volcanic to the serene, the vividly experimental to the perfectly resolved. Each, in their own way, achieved a fusion of surface and form that could not be approximated in any other discipline.

Three artists active in the post-1945 era – Rudolf Staffel (1911-2002), Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011), and Rose Cabat (1914-2015) – suggest the variety of approaches to abstraction that flourished in American ceramics of this period.

Rudolf Staffel is best known for his Light Gatherers, vessels made in translucent porcelain that blaze into ethereal glory when illuminated. While these works are created in monochrome white, a closer look at his oeuvre shows him to be one of the great colorists in ceramic history.

Toshiko Takaezu was the prime exponent of Abstract Expressionism in ceramics. While her signature 'closed forms' synthesized many different trajectories of thinking, including historic East Asian precedents, they were above all an opportunity to paint in the round.

Cabat was yet another self-taught glaze chemist, who built up a huge palette of colors and textures over time; each of her pieces is somewhat like a single brushstroke within an ongoing pointillist composition.

Three contemporary artists included in Painting in the Dark suggest the range of painterly exploration currently unfolding in the discipline.

The work of Tony Marsh (b. 1954) seems to have been not so much made as unleashed. Painting in the Dark features his aptly titled series Neo-Crucibles, an allusion to the vessels in which chemists (and before them, alchemists) bring about their reactions. The works are indeed compounds of color and texture, simultaneously recalling geological specimens and modernist collages.

Marsh’s contemporary Marit Tingleff (b. 1954) works at spectacularly large scale, making full use of this arena of action, covering the surface with coursing rivulets of glaze. In terms of format, Tingleff ’s work is the most explicitly painting-like of the works included here, yet its weight and assertive materiality clearly establishes its medium-specific character.

Informed by her deep interest in historical and contemporary painting, her works are often like canvases that have been furled and manipulated, forming compositionally complex, internally relational topologies.

Taken as a whole, Painting in the Dark provides viewers with an intense and sensually gratifying aesthetic experience, while also making clear that the discipline of ceramics, so often marginalized in the past, has played a crucial part in the history of painterly abstraction.

Glenn Adamson's curatorial essay can be found HERE.

For inquiries regarding Painting in the Dark, please contact James Cohan at jcohan@jamescohan.com or 212.714.9500. 

For press inquiries, please contact Sarah Stengel at sstengel@jamescohan.com or 212.714.9500.