ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Mai Thu Perret

Mai-Thu Perret is known for her multidisciplinary practice that engages feminist politics, literary texts and homemade crafts, alongside a range of 20th century avant-garde and radical art movements, from Constructivism and Dada to Bauhaus design. Demonstrating an interest in Eastern religions, the occult and the natural world, Perret has described her practice as “more like a symphony than a single voice”.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery

Mai-Thu Perret presents new works in her solo exhibition “Mother Sky” in Los Angeles. While she has availed herself of a wide range of mediums, Perret’s use of ceramics has served as a clearinghouse for sculptural experimentation in which a wide range of techniques and approaches to color and texture have resulted in objects of varied scales, types, and conceptual orientations. This exhibition includes a wall-mounted ceramic work, among Perret’s largest and most ambitious to date; a figurative ceramic sculpture based on a digital scan of an ancient sculpture of the goddess Minerva; and smaller ceramic works dedicated to animal and other forms. By way of juxtaposition, the show also features a neon work in which Perret engages with the legacy of multidisciplinary Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp. With painterly, overlapping layers of commercial glazes whose final appearance was revealed only after a multi-stage firing process, the circular work evokes both the encompassing, swirling energy of an earthly ecosystem and the craggy luminosity of the moon, bringing the grandeur and unruliness of the outside world into the interior space of the gallery. Some sections feature rough, even violent, finger marks that resemble geological formations; others are filled with swarms of linear impressions and the sense of movement—of air, of water—they create. Punctuating these amorphous passages are small, three-dimensional images of birds and frogs, which, in addition to accentuating the work’s imposing scale, introduce the possibility of expanded narrative and mythological meaning. Perret’s interest in myths and other stories that pervade both cultural histories and the ways in which people interpret them finds moving expression in “Minerva III” (2022), a previous version of which was originally produced for, and exhibited in, a solo exhibition at Istituto Svizzero in Rome. In addition to its broad conceptual reach and striking presence, the work synthesizes many aspects of Perret’s project, including her multi-faceted approach to the mutability of clay; her incisive knowledge of how women have shaped the collective imagination; and her deep understanding of the past, present, and future of major art historical genres like sculpture and painting. Based on “readymade,” open-domain digital scans of a two-thousand-year-old, monumental reconstruction of a statue of the Greek goddess of wisdom, “Minerva III” is not only the result of twenty-first century technical processes, but a composite form that documents the complex global conditions in which twenty-first century life continues to unfold. Perret has reproduced the face of a family member in order to replace the modern facsimile that adorns the Greek original today. New visions of beauty give rise to another kind of goddess, not to mention new ideas about how objects function in relation to the ideals they commemorate. In other ceramic works on view, Perret continues to explore how art offers a seemingly endless supply of interpretive lenses by which the forces of the natural world can be channeled into physical objects. She also establishes connections to and among the other, larger sculptures in the exhibition, further amplifying their formal range and symbolic connections. Rough-hewn, brightly glazed birds, which echo the elemental simplicity of Etruscan funerary objects, contrast the earthiness of clay with the ethereal, immortal realms birds are often taken to represent. Ceramic frogs made using press-molds that are in turn enlargements of small, lacquer-like boxes, meanwhile, exemplify the precision by which clay can be manipulated, even as they serve as reminders of awkward, uncanny truths about the human body that witches, magicians, alchemists, and philosophers have associated with frogs for millennia.

Photo Left: Mai-Thu Perret, She escapes the diamond pitfall and eats up the prickly thorns, 2022, glazed ceramic, 18 1/2 x 16 x 3 1/4 inches (47 x 40.6 x 8.3 cm), © Mai-Thu Perret, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Center: Mai-Thu Perret, Turn left, turn right, utterly free, 2022, glazed ceramic, 18 1/8 x 13 7/8 x 4 3/4 inches (46 x 35.2 x 12.1 cm), © Mai-Thu Perret, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery. Right: Mai-Thu Perret, Words cannot touch it, thought cannot reach it, 2022, glazed ceramic, 19 1/8 x 14 5/8 x 1 7/8 inches (48.6 x 37.1 x 4.8 cm), © Mai-Thu Perret, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 18/3-22/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/