June 02 — June 23, 2024
Tuesday — Saturday 12PM — 6PM
Organized by Galerie Lulla, Barnsdall Art Park Foundation and ZZArt Concept
Galerie Lulla at 620 Imperial Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021
Galerie Lulla is proud to present FOR THE LOVE OF CLAY, a group exhibition supporting the Barnsdall Junior Art Center’s Ceramics Studio. This exhibition brings together a diverse collection of Los Angeles artists who focus on ceramics, offering a window into contemporary explorations of the medium, from traditional functional objects to the conceptual and experimental.
Special thanks to Luis de Jesus Los Angeles, Hannah Hoffman, Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Night Gallery, Nonaka-Hill, and Roche Projects for helping make this possible.
Proceeds from artwork sales will support the ceramic studios and classes at the Barnsdall Junior Art center, advancing its mission to foster creativity through engagement and publicly accessible classes for adults and children.
To inquire about exhibition sales, please send a message in our contact page info@galerielulla.com. A portion of proceeds will benefit the Barnsdall Art Park Foundation's support of the Barnsdall Art Center and Junior Art Center's ceramics programming.
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Adam Alessi is a self-taught artist whose tense and bizarre oil and flashe paintings depict tricksters, dolls, masks and puppets amidst distorted perspectives. Alessi’s work, much like the charlatans it is depicting, is confusing and ambiguous, tricking the viewer with its stretched out figures and long and guilty noses.
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Adam D. Miller was born in Bellevue, WA (1982) and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Design in 2008 and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Sacramento in 2005. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include The Future Perfect NYC, Gattopardo Los Angeles, Lefebvre & Fils Paris, and a 2 person exhibition at the Newsstand Project Los Angeles with Ryan Schneider, among various other exhibitions. In 2012 he was selected as one of Art Review’s “future greats”. Miller is also the co-founder of the artist-run gallery The Pit in Los Angeles, as well as the lead designer and owner of Reaperware, a functional ceramics line launching in 2023. He has curated dozens of exhibitions in California and New York including at The Torrance Art Museum, Verge Center of the Arts in Sacramento CA, the Luckman Fine Arts Complex in Los Angeles among others. He has also designed, edited, and published dozens of artist publications through The Pit’s former Risograph imprint. He is represented by The Future Perfect (LA, NYC, SF), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami), and Le Febvre & Fils (Paris).
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Anna Furman (b. 1990) is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. Her biomorphic sculptures meld and distort familiar forms found in nature including pits, seeds, tendrils and nipples. Such material explorations of surface and tactility include experiments across medium and scale. Furman has contributed to The New York Times, New York Magazine and Artforum, as well as “Great Women Painters” (Phaidon, 2022).
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Angelica Lorenzi (b. 1990) is an Italian designer, multidisciplinary artist and educator currently living in Los Angeles. Angelica holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Innsbruck and a Master of Architecture degree with honors from Die Angewandte in Vienna. Her love for unconventional material applications, and traditional crafts at a small scale brought her to relate art to the design of interiors, products, and architecture. Over the last six years Angelica has researched the function and form of utilitarian and decorative objects experimenting with a plethora of materials, in particular concrete, epoxy clay and ceramic. Her sculptural objects involve whimsy in both their narrative and assembly. Angelica's work has been shown in various international exhibitions and galleries, including the Venice Architecture Biennale, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Cleo the Gallery, Modest Common and the Vienna Biennale. The floor lamp "Divination" and the table lamp "Apollo" are part of the Zabludowicz Collection. Lorenzi creates works that draw on the knowledge and crafts passed down from our ancestors, reinterpreting them in the contemporary context. Her work, the result of a slow process of research, manifests itself through multiple identities that take the form of domestic objects, rituals and worlds that linger between the magical and the real. Lorenzi's work includes lights, tables, mirrors, and vases that incorporate materials such as ceramics, papier-mâché and fabric. Lorenzi uses traditional materials such as ceramic to create unconventional forms that dismantle traditional structures and conceptions of functional objects. Her sculptures often feature undulating glazes and tactile textures that replicate surfaces found in nature. Her work is inspired by an eclectic spectrum of references from Italian and American culture. From plants, flowers, and cartoon creatures to the contemporary imagery of the city imbued with its popular culture. Lorenzi interprets and combines this different aesthetics with the intention of creating works that subvert the everyday perception of domestic spaces.ription text goes here
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Claudia V. Solórzano is a Los Angeles based artist and educator working in ceramic sculpture. In her practice she utilizes ceramic materials to examine the ephemerality of communities of the Greater Los Angeles Area often confronted with gentrification. Her encounters with architectural motifs from the Los Angeles urban landscape are reconceived and rendered in clay sculptures. Claudia obtained her Bachelors in Fine Arts with an emphasis in Ceramics from California State University, Long Beach in 2017 and her Masters in Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University in 2022. Her most recent exhibitions include the 79th Scripps College Ceramic Annual at Ruth Chandlerson Gallery in Claremont, CA and Fahrenheit 2024 at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA.
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David Hicks (b. 1977) is an artist and educator who lives and works in his hometown of Visalia, California. He received a BFA in Ceramic Arts from California State University Long Beach (2003) and an MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University, New York (2006). Hicks creates hand-built earthenware sculptures in a myriad of evocative agrarian forms – thorny petaled artichokes and budding pomegranates, long-husked corn plants and slim bean pods, striated gourds and cut branches. His ceramics are glazed with dynamic applications, some mottled and layered, others bubbling and dripping.
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Elysabeth Gwendoline Belle, was born to immigrant parents in Cleveland Ohio, where she also grew up. Both of Belle’s parents were artists, with her father being an architect and builder, and her mother a well known wallpaper designer. Her mother enrolled her in many art classes as a child and when Belle was in high school her mother had her work in her studio, teaching her to mix colors and create designs. She then went away to college to Andrews University where she studied architecture and interior design for 2 years but then decided to pursue fine art. After returning to Cleveland Belle got accepted to The Cleveland Institute of Art, and also got a job at the Cleveland Museum of Art. After starting a family and ending up in Los Angeles, Belle after 30 years returned to school and finished her BFA at ArtCenter College of Design, and her MFA at Claremont Graduate University. Belle not only works in ceramics, but is also a painter. You can see her work at her website www.elysabethbelle.com and also on Instagram @egbelle
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Emily Marchand envelops ceramics, cooking, and community organizing in her art practice. Inspired by the native and manufactured landscapes of Los Angeles, she makes forms embedded with vegetables, fruits, eggs, flora and fauna. What began as an investigation and exploration into Big Agriculture, seed banks and food scarcity has inspired a closer look into her own relationship to her community through food, cooking, gardening, feeding friends and unhoused neighbors. Adjacent to her art practice, she cooks for a living as a food stylist and as a volunteer for local non-profit organizations feeding the unhoused community including Brown Bag Lady, Downtown Women’s Center, and MEND Poverty. Marchand received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Selected projects in Los Angeles include Microgreens at La Loma Projects, Solarium at The Pit, A Thousand Lunches, Current: LA Food Public Art Triennial, homeLA, and Artists + Institutions at MAK Center.
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Emily Sudd is a multimedia artist working primarily in ceramic sculpture. Her work engages in conversation with still life, narrative, and abstract painting; postminimalist sculpture; and hierarchies of materials and taste. Her recent group of hand-built ceramic vessel pieces made with a combination of white porcelain, colored porcelain, a dark-bodied stoneware, and terracotta are fired to the high temperatures suited for the stoneware and porcelain bodies. As the terracotta is a low-fire material, it is unable to withstand the hightemperature firing and thusly melts and bubbles. The clay itself produces much of the surface and texture in these pieces as there is little to no glaze used. The works appear as if frozen in a state of transition and often seem to defy gravity, eliciting a sense of entropic disorientation. Sudd lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); an MA from California State University, Northridge (CSUN); and a BA from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She has participated in several group exhibitions at notable venues including the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Craft Contemporary, Roberts & Tilton, Ochi Projects, Luis De Jesus, the Brand Library and Art Center, Anat Ebgi, and Sargent’s Daughters Gallery, among other. Sudd has had solo exhibitions at the Weingart Gallery at Occidental College, LAM Gallery in Los Angeles, and James Harris Gallery in Seattle. She is currently adjunct assistant professor of ceramics at Pasadena City College.
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Galia Linn is a sculptor, painter, and site-responsive installation artist living and working in Los Angeles. She has shown nationally and internationally, and her work is included in numerous private collections in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. Her work has been featured in LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Art + Cake, and KCRW’s Art Talk. In Los Angeles she is represented by Track 16 Gallery. A childhood and early adulthood spent in war torn Israel surrounded by archaeological sites and spaces instilled her with intimate connections to ancient and contemporary relics from past and present civilizations, as well as the understanding that each place has a story to tell and relationships to uncover. Linn’s work with sculptural materials, painting, and installation reacts to the stories, relics, and imperfections that emerge, conflating time and geography, allowing elemental tensions to come to the surface. In addition to her prolific studio practice, Linn is the founder of Blue Roof Studios (BRS), a multidisciplinary art hub located in South Los Angeles. Informed by the core themes of her own studio practice, BRS offers a place for artists to work in an environment that fosters creativity and community. The venue also offers public programming that promotes dialog around art and cultural production. Linn is the founder of Arts at Blue Roof, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Through studio residencies, mentorship, and public programs, AaBR seeks to build long-term relationships with artists and audiences to support accessible arts programs and meaningful arts experiences. In conjunction with AaBR, Linn founded A Room of One’s Own artist residency, which provides women artists with financial resources and a studio to work. In this dedicated space, outside of their homes, they can explore materials, investigate ideas, and create, free from distractions and everyday responsibilities.
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Jay Kvapil (b. 1951) is a potter and educator based in California who studied tea ceremony ware at the Takatori Seizan Pottery in the island of Kyushu in Southern Japan. After returning to the United States, he obtained his MA (1979) and MFA (1981) from San Jose State University, California. Kvapil taught at the University of Hawaii (1984), then moved to California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) in 1986, where he served a variety of roles, including Professor of Art (Ceramics), Director of the School of Art and Interim Dean of the College of the Arts.
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Lucile Littot (b. 1985 Paris, France) is a French visual artist who lives and works between Paris, Onesse-Laharie in France and Athens in Greece. Her artistic practice encompasses painting, ceramic and sculptural work that. The pieces are beautiful, flamboyant, baroque and glamourous. Lucile Littot's universe strikes by its freedom, its singularity, its prosperity for exuberance, which is alternatively baroque, rococo, romantic, dreamlike, grotesque, caricatural, caustic, joyful and tragic. Glamorous and trash, Littot plays with hierachies and aesthetic categories to draw references from both the field of scholarly and popular culture. The objects in her installations then become the symbolic catalysts of multiple, intimate, personal, family, cultural, religious, historical references, with a predilection for tragi-glorious female destinies. In 2022 Littot was awarded the 91530 Le Marais Residency in Le Val Saint Germain in France and the Residency for Cermica Suro in Guadalajara in Mexico in 2020. She has received production grants for ‘La Nuit tous les chats sont gris’ from DRAC in île de France in 2022 and from Fondation Des Artistes for the project “Mommie Dearest” in 2020. Lucile Littot’s work is part of the FRAC Pays de Loire Collection in Nantes, France.
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Rando Aso has lived and studied in major ceramic-producing areas, and now resides in Minokamo. Aso is especially attracted to ancient firing techniques and is fascinated by the effects that they have on clay so he explores different methods to create his one-of-a-kind earthenware works. In “Noyaki,” he fires clay in burning grass, branches and wood in a hot, open field. Using this method, Aso produces “Yakishime” objects, which are unglazed and “painted” with fire and smoke. Aso also creates “Kokutou” work: he first fires it in a hot kiln and then places it in rice husks that burn and smoke the piece creating a blackened surface. Using time-honored methods of artistry, Aso bridges the ancient and modern to create contemporary ceramics.
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Miyakono Yasuda, born in 1972, is a pottery artist whose work draws inspiration from the Jomon era, reflecting a profound connection with the natural world and ancient Japanese cultural practices, particularly those related to the creation and firing of earthenware.
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Shoshi Watanabe is a ceramic artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Combining traditional Japanese techniques with a laid-back California aesthetic, Shoshi's work is subtly expressive and draws inspiration from the natural world.