Richard Shaw, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
The most widely circulated image of Objects: USA, taken at the exhibition’s inaugural presentation in Washington, DC, has in the foreground a sofa decorated with cows. This improbable object was made by Richard Shaw, then passing through a brief surrealist phase en route to an astonishingly accomplished superrealism. A Californian through and through—he was born in Hollywood—Shaw had studied with Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis, the beating heart of Funk ceramics. But that movement’s sometimes slovenly craftsmanship was not for him. Already in the late 1960s, Shaw was developing a highly refined sensibility, making mixed-media works in clay, wood, and metal. In 1971, he began a collaboration with artist Robert Hudson—the two had studios near to one another in Stinson Beach—involving casting found objects in porcelain.
Their back-and forth conversation yielded associative, collage-like still lifes, which in retrospect seem like harbingers of postmodernism; they were featured in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1973, which in the words of ceramist Ron Nagle, “changed everything—for Richard and for ceramic art.”¹ The beguiling combination of absurdism and perfectionism of this work did indeed pave the way for a new direction in the field, and for Shaw’s own future works—most famously his trompe l’oeil figures composed of various everyday objects, which prove on closer inspection to be entirely made of clay.
¹ Diane Evans, Introduction to Richard Shaw: Four Decades of Ceramics (Sonoma: Sonoma County Museum, 2010), 13.
Vessel in glazed earthenware. Designed and made by Richard Shaw, USA, 1970.
10.13" H x 9.5" D
25.7cm H 24.1cm D
SC867
Collection of Richard and Martha Shaw