Viola Frey, an artist known for large, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women that expanded the traditional limitations of ceramic sculpture, died on Monday at her home in Oakland, California. She was 70.

The cause was colon cancer, said Nancy Hoffman, her New York dealer.

Ms. Frey was one of a number of California artists working in clay in the 1950's and 60's who turned away from that medium's conventional refinement to produce works with robust sculptural qualities associated with Abstract Expressionist painting, Pop Art and what would come to be known as California Funk.

Inspired partly by the primitivistic paintings of Jean Dubuffet, Ms. Frey began producing large plates in the early 60's bearing antic narrative images, as well as sculptures and paintings. It was not until the late 70's, after she moved into her large studio in Oakland, that she had room to start creating her signature bigger-than-life figurative works. Standing about nine feet high and constructed of separate pieces so that horizontal seams were visible, these massive men and women were rendered in a simplified, cartoonish style, the men in generic suits and ties, the women in simple, 50's-style dresses and old-fashioned hairdos.

Ms. Frey's figures were comical, but they typically had enigmatically blank, severe or angry expressions. Works like "Man Kicking World" (2002), in which a seated man pushes an enormous globe with his foot, imply broad political themes.

Viola Ruth Frey was born in Lodi, California, where she grew up on a farm. Interested in art since childhood, she received a bachelor's degree in fine arts from the California College of the Arts, where the painter Richard Diebenkorn was one of her teachers, and a master's degree in fine arts from Tulane University, where she studied with Mark Rothko.

In 1958 Ms. Frey moved to New York, where she worked at the Museum of Modern Art's business office and at the Clay Art Center, a pioneering ceramics center in Port Chester, New York. Attracked by contemporary developments in ceramic sculpture in California and by San Francisco figurative painters, Ms. Frey moved to San Francisco in 1960. She had her first solo exhibition there in 1974 at Wenger Gallery. She also taught at the California College of the Arts from 1965 to 1998. Her works are in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
There were no immediate survivors.