Courtesy of the artist.
Titling is perhaps an underrated aspect of contemporary art, but through British-born, New York–based artist Jesse Wine, we see how important—and brilliant—the pairing of language and objects can be. Wine has made works called How Can Something So Old Be So Wrong? And I Think You Ought to Know, I’m Going Through a Creative Stage People Find Difficult To Connect To. But of all his titles, perhaps the most evocative is that of a 2017 show: Prosper, Phantom Limb. The phrase could be taken in many ways. One of them, certainly, is as a direct address to ceramic sculpture, which has long been unmoored from its original foundation in functionality, but keeps going as an independent, perhaps somewhat imaginary entity.
Wine is happy to declare his love for certain luminaries of the field—above all, Ken Price. And his multipart, hand-built forms, which tend to riff on modernist figurative strategies, clearly recall some of the wilder inclusions in the original Objects: USA. The wit and intellectual intensity of Wine’s work, however, is entirely his own. He embodies a thrilling liberation from the lineages of clay and an embrace of whatever comes next.
You have a new memory sculpture in ceramic. Made and designed by Jesse Wine, USA, 2019.
34" L x 21" W x 24" H
86.4cm L x 53.3cm W x 61cm H
SC811
Courtesy of Simone Subal Gallery