Entertainment - The Arts - December 22, 2000

The power of object and image

Two Shadyside galleries offer artistic contrasts

By Graham Shearing
TRIBUNE-REVIEW ART CRITIC

Kirk Mangus has been showing at the Clay Place since 1975, and although he is par excellence an experimental potter, you can recognize his work if not by his style then by his robust method of handling clay. The current show of his most recent work bears no signature, in keeping with the artisanal nature of his work - as with painting, you don't judge a piece by a signature.

Everything in the exhibition is profoundly utilitarian - bowls, plates, vases, tea bowls - and presumably can stand the rigors of the kitchen range and dishwashing machine. At prices between $20 to $140, you have a clear sense that these vessels are for use, although many of the larger ones have obvious sculptural qualities.

Mangus has a considerable following at the Clay Place - all of the more expensive pieces were sold at the opening to local collectors. The red "sold" sticker is almost a decorative feature of his shows there.

For all this emphasis on craft, function and the handmade, the paradox remains that Mangus makes works of art. His pieces might celebrate the primitive properties of thick local clays and dense glazes, but they take them to another place. Their surfaces seem to me to be essentially painterly and expressive. Sometimes the drawings (which he habitually makes) appear on these surfaces: press-molded, carved or merely brush-drawn. In this show the emphasis is on the visceral in painting, with great blobs and sweeps of different colors and the coarse marks of the brush. The ceramic sensibility is oriental and influenced by the work of the Englishman, Bernard Leach, but the painting draws on modernism, and most particularly, abstract expressionism. Above all, Mangus' work has potency and strength.

Michael Berger's holiday exhibition amounts to a tough potpourri and avoids all of the sentimentality of the season. These are serious works of art of the kind that make you frown before you smile. Many are even troubling, and even if you don't buy, you might find the images coming home with you. A large lithograph by Claes Oldenberg, "Soft Saxophone," 1992, and two images by Patricia Tobacco Forrester (a watercolor and a lithograph), bring a certain easy-to-read scale to this show, but these are exceptions. The great body of exhibits require closer, careful and thoughtful reading. Leonard Leibowitz's handmade book contains a series of aquatinted etchings that call up the Holocaust in image and text. Here the anger one finds in similar work by Goya is moderated by gravity and pathos. Note also a volume of lithographs by Ben Shahn, "The Hallelujah Suite," 1971, and a portfolio of images put together by Christian Boltanski, "Favorite Objects," 1998. Like Leibowitz's book, the Shahn and Boltanski are works of meditation and reflection. The same is probably the case with Richard Artschwager's "Four Approximate Objects," 1970-91. If you know the work of William Anastasi from the Mattress Factory, then the etchings at Berger might surprise you. "Ich Bin Jude" and prints from the delicately colored series, "jew," are paradoxically blatant and reticent, "playing" image with idea in an unsettling way. After that, the wall of wood cuts by Richard Bosman somewhat breaks the tension, and necessarily so. Four images, printed in color with blue predominating and yellow effects of light, depicting skeletal bridges (one thinks of Whistler, and the Japanese woodblock print), surely are too simply beautiful. The juxtaposition is puzzling, and effective, bringing another level of sensibility to this strange and interesting exhibition. Graham Shearing can be reached at gshearing@tribweb.com.

New ceramic vessels by Kirk Mangus at the Clay Place. 'New Work' by Kirk Mangus See another great article on Kirk Mangus.