This is Frey’s first posthumous exhibition at the gallery, organized around the theme of her personal vocabulary of images, which cascade from two-dimensional pastel drawings on the wall to three-dimensional freestanding sculptures. Frey built a vocabulary of images over the years of figures, figurines, commedia dell’ arte masks, horses, Wedgwood couples—the list goes on and on. Most of the images in her smaller sculptures come from a collection of figurines she amassed over more than 20 years at flea markets. She cast ceramic images from these figurines, and painted them with her own palette, abstracting the form, selecting color based on a total composition. Some of the figurines refer to her upbringing on a farm in Lodi, California (such as the rooster); others intrigued her visually as possibilities for her work. She had a “rule” about pieces she selected at flea markets, the pieces had to fit into her pocket as she traveled to and from the flea markets on a bus.

The works span three decades from the ‘70s to the early 2000s. The works on paper range from watercolor to acrylic to pastel, the sculptures from a freestanding single rooster to plates to bricolage pieces: compilations of figures and figurines, representing for the artist the abstractions of contemporary society. Included also is a heroic tile wall, measuring 100x140 inches, filled with men in “blue power suits,” Frey’s signature garb for her monumental standing and seated sculptures; and women in dresses based on ‘50s style. The artist kept a dress from this era as a prototype of style, and made variations on this dress throughout her career.

Frey’s 1977-78 “Rooster” is the only single rooster sculpture created by the artist. This bird, a symbol of growing up on the grape farm, appeared over and over in the artist’s oeuvre, in drawing, painting, tile walls, and bricolage pieces. The freestanding sculpture is glazed boldly with reds, yellows, oranges, and its stance too is bold and defiant.

In her 1975 watercolor “Pink Man and Venus,” the rooster gazes into the composition benignly on the right side of the painting, one of the characters, as a dog looks into the center and up--as if gazing at the moon--on the left side; a believable gathering of friends. Frey’s lush color background is pure abstraction, a manifestation of her love of color. In her “Untitled (Seated Nude Figure, Red Background),” from ca. 1985, the rooster is a small figurine without power in its companionship to the woman who appears to float on a square of blue above a triumvirate of figurines. In her “Man in Suit with Rooster in Pants,” the bird is full throttle orange, a spirit arising from the man in a blue power suit. Perhaps Frey’s ongoing dialogue with this bird that has become synonymous with the “barnyard” had to do with her associations to her past and her childhood when her unpleasant responsibility at the farm was with chickens and roosters? Or is it, as a member of the bird family, a symbol of the human spirit?

Pink Man and Venus II, 1975, acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Throughout her life, Frey declared her love of the figure, which sings forth in this exhibition in her watercolors of the ‘70s, her bricolage pieces of the ‘80s, and her tile walls of the ‘90s. For Frey it was the glory of the female and male figure itself, no particular person, which engaged her mind, eye and hand. She hand built her larger-than-life figures from the toes to the head, bit by bit, squeezing the clay over many months, sometimes a year. Her cast figures in the bricolage series, while much smaller in scale, emanate the stance, the energy and the determination of her large-scale sculptures, symbols of man and woman of our times.

Known for her larger-than-life sculptures of men and women, this exhibition illuminates other aspects of Frey’s work, her roundness and fullness as an artist, her command of a wide range of media, her encyclopedic interest in life and “things” of all sorts; from high art in the “Venus” figurine in “Pink Man and Venus,” to ordinary objects exemplified by a baseball glove and a globe in her pastel drawing “Untitled (Man in Suit with Rooster in Pants).” Like her monumental figures, Frey, who stood not much taller than five feet, was a giant in her own right!

The artist’s work has been widely shown throughout the country at the Albany Museum of Art, Georgia; American Craft Museum, New York; Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Alaska; The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; Avampato Discovery Museum, Charleston, West Virginia; Bayly Art Museum, Charlottesville, Virginia; Brevard Museum of Art and Science, Melbourne, Florida; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina; Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida; Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, Illinois; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dahl Fine Arts Center, Rapid City, South Dakota; DeCordova and Dana Museum and Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Fresno Museum of Art, California; Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey; Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York;

Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Madison Art Center, Wisconsin; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Museum of Ceramic Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Oakland Museum of Art, California; Pewabic Pottery, Detroit; Queens Museum, Flushing, New York; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; The Queens Museum, New York; St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Santa Barbara Museum, California; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Smithsonian Institution, Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas; among others; and abroad at the American Center, Paris; Daimaru Museum of Art, Osaka-Umeda; Hall du Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Victoria and Albert Museum in London; and LaForet Museum, Koto-ku, Tokyo.

Untitled (Bending woman, man, torso), 1985, acrylic on paper, 31 x 22 inches

Untitled (Standing Female Nude & Bearded Man), 1983, acrylic on paper, 31 x 22 inches

Untitled (Standing Female Nude & Bearded Man), 1983, acrylic on paper, 30 x 22 inches

Viola Frey’s work is represented in numerous public collections, among them: American Craft Museum, New York; The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Minnesota; Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, Georgia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;

The Oakland Museum, California; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; The Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville; Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Wichita Center for the Arts, Kansas. Abroad, her work is included in the collections of Manufacture de Sevres, Paris; Museum Bellrive, Zurich and The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shigaraki, Japan.

Viola Frey received an Honorary Doctorate, California College of the Arts, Oakland. She was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and received an Award of Honor in Sculpture from the Arts Commission of San Francisco. This exhibition has been organized in conjunction with the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, California.

Untitled (Colored Hand with Face), 1985-90, ceramic, 31 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 14 inches

Untitled (Mask with Pink & Orange Arms), 2001-02, ceramic, 26 1/2 x 26 1/2 x 5 inches

 

For additional information and/or photographs, please call 212-966-6676 or e-mail Nancy Hoffman Gallery at info@nancyhoffmangallery.com. Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm.