Nancy Hoffman Gallery is honored to host Viola Frey’s fifth posthumous show: Faces, Masks, and Figurines. Though known for her monumental ceramic figures of every man and every woman, Frey simultaneously worked on sculptures in a variety of scales, as well as drawings and paintings that feature the figure surrounded by a panoply of her figurines. This presentation offers a more intimate view of the artist’s work: a look into the personal and autobiographical nature of her drawings and paintings, as well as the allure of her tondos and smaller sculptures. Viola Frey: Faces, Masks, and Figurines will be on view from November 10 through December 31, 2022.
A primary source of Frey’s visual lexicon was her large collection of figurines, which she acquired from local flea markets during the 1970s. Frey began to use these figurines first as silhouettes on her plates, and also as cast figurines on her bricolage sculptures. They soon appeared in different contexts and media – in paintings as the characters of her studio, then symbols of their own in drawings, tondos, and cast figurine tableaux. Frey’s use of figurines in every medium throughout her life indicates how important they were to the artist; objects imbued with cultural as well as personal meaning.
Frey also made the work personal by making it autobiographical. The artist’s hand, cast from her own hand creating the work appears in many of the tondos; her self-portrait, rendered in profile and in silhouette, inserts the artist into the dream-like tableaux of the studio in the drawings; the studio window creates a voyeuristic look into the artist’s backyard, casting the viewer into the scene. The monumental suited men, which were being hand-built, up to six at one time nearby, made their way into her drawings alongside the nude figures sketched from models hired to pose during kiln-firing days each week. The model would become the centerpiece of the drawing surrounded by the swirl of studio activity including figurines, hand-built monumental sculptures, windows, doorways and foliage patterns.
Color and iconography unite the different materials in Faces, Masks and Figurines. Her work is both representation and abstraction; realistic and surrealistic; intimate and monumental. Viola Frey’s use of bold color, paired with the myriad figurines, figures, and renderings mashed-up with autobiographical experience demonstrates an artistic style unique to the artist, impossible to categorize.
Viola Frey (b. 1933, Lodi, California; d. 2004, Oakland) received her CFA and honorary doctorate from California College of the Arts and Crafts and attended graduate school at Tulane University. She was awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Award of Honor in Sculpture from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and many other grants and awards.
Her work is in numerous public collections, including the Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Musee d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among many others.
For additional information and/or photographs, please call 212-966-6676 or e- mail Nancy Hoffman Gallery at [email protected].
This presentation was organized in conjunction with Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Oakland, California.
