In the 1950s and ’60s, a group of California-based artists led by Peter Voulkos revolutionized American ceramics, absorbing influences from Asia and elsewhere and defying long-held aesthetic norms in the ancient medium.
These upstarts took a free-wheeling, experimental approach to their work, and it did not take long for their innovations to ignite excitement in the field and begin to be noticed by the broader art world.
The center of this activity was the Otis Art Institute (then known as the Los Angeles County Art Institute), where Voulkos established a ceramics program in 1954, attracting a group of young artists, including John Mason, Malcolm McClain, Kenneth Price, Jerry Rothman, Paul Soldner and Harry Takemoto.
“What took place at Otis was by any standard a major event. The students in that group have gone on to become the leading artists, teachers and designers in ceramics today,” wrote Garth Clark in his book, “American Ceramics: 1876 to the Present.”
Among the most prominent of these Otis alumni is Soldner, 87. His lifetime achievements are being celebrated in a solo exhibition, which continues through Feb. 22 in the University of Denver’s Victoria Myhren Gallery.
The show contains 58 works dating from 1956 through 2006 — nearly the entirety of his career — and highlighting the principal directions of his output. All but four are on loan from the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, Calif.
That this career retrospective — Soldner’s first since 1991 — is taking place in Colorado is not random. In 1954, the Summerfield, Ill., native earned a master of arts degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was first introduced to ceramics.
In addition, he co-founded the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village in 1966, and for much of his life he has divided his time between there and Claremont, Calif., where he taught at Scripps College for 37 years.
Although he has never achieved the fame of Voulkos, Soldner has carved his own significant place in the history of the medium with a multifaceted, five-decade body of work and the hundreds of students he has taught.
He is especially renowned for his many technical breakthroughs, including his perfection of a kind of American take on the venerable Asian technique raku, in which still-hot pieces are pulled from the kiln as soon as the glaze has melted.
While it is impossible to separate Soldner from the California ceramic tradition, it is also clear that he developed his own distinctive style, a kind of refined unrefinement, which allows for surprising variety.
Among the most notable attributes of his creations is the sheer unpredictability built into them. While Soldner sets the direction and has a vision for how a piece will look, it is clear that he lets the vagaries inherent in firing and the rest of the process determine the outcome, reveling in the serendipity of it all.
Like many ceramicists, he began his career with updated takes on vessels, and never completely abandoned them. A few dozen of these works are on view, including five bottles and vases in a vitrine at the show’s entrance — all slightly off-balance and asymmetrical yet eminently elegant in their quirky ways.
But as his career has progressed, Soldner focused increasingly on sculptural pieces, which exert a powerful presence and vibrancy. Some, such as a 19-by-16-by-18-inch pedestal piece from 2002, combine semicylindrical elements, some bulbous, others slightly squished, which jut into space and fold into each other, suggesting anthropomorphic forms.
In a similar vein is another pedestal piece from 2002, with its voluptuous curves and undulations giving way to folds and tucks, reminiscent of certain sea shells. Perhaps most striking is its wonderfully textured, sandy surface.
Other pieces are constructed of a kind of tectonic plates, ragged-edged, more or less flat chunks of clay that look like they have been ripped from the earth and then fitted together in rough yet graceful ways.
Examples include a 30-by-27-by-9-inch pedestal piece from 1987, with a lovely rust-colored surface, and 1990 pedestal piece measuring 24 by 40 by 10 inches. Both have obvious embossed patterns, including the sole of a shoe visible on the surface of the latter.
Soldner not only changed the course of contemporary ceramics, but, as the exhibition makes clear, he also deserves to be seen as a significant American artist regardless of medium.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
