Join us on Los Angeles’ West Side for the gallery’s inaugural participation in Post–Fair

Post-Fair
Booth 21

Santa Monica Post Office
1248 5th Street
Santa Monica, CA 90406

Fair Hours
Thursday February 26, 11AM – 8PM
Friday February 27, 11AM – 6PM
Saturday February 28, 11AM – 6PM

Get Post–Fair tickets here.

Marta is pleased to announce its inaugural participation in Post–Fair with a presentation of work by Pasadena-based master ceramicist George Sherman. Located in the iconic Santa Monica Post Office, the gallery has seeded a section of the Art Deco building with a forest of the artist’s floor works, their slender forms bound to industry—to the architecture and instruments used to channel heat in order to preserve, protect, and transform its material concerns.

Arranged in a grid along the linear footprint of Booth 21, Sherman’s waist-high structures, hand-built and fired on his property in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, are expressions of history. They may be the chimneys of brickworks, releasing elements into the atmosphere and extending the lineage of clay, unchanged in its method of transfiguration for millenia, or the swiveling periscopes of submarines cruising just below the ocean’s surface, a familiar sight, perhaps, to the artist who grew up as a self-described ‘Navy Brat.’ A native of San Diego, Sherman’s works draw a distinct comparison to smudge pots, the oil-burning devices used to prevent frost in orchards. Invented in the early twentieth century and first fabricated in San Bernardino County, smudge pots came into widespread use in Southern California in 1913 after a crop-decimating freeze and remained common through the 1970s. These heaters, once embedded in the function of the state’s agricultural industry, are grounded in their geographic origin, their louvered stacks affixed to hollow bases reflected in the artist’s apertural necks over heavy foundations, richly glazed in dark and light tones like smoke against citrus. Herein lies the eternal conflict of our region; a place of pleasant abundance that, whether because of frost or fire, remains highly susceptible—threatened by the very nature of its own beauty.

These pieces, the construction of which allows them to occupy unlikely spaces—nooks, crannies, and corners that subvert traditional methodologies of display—offer a foil to the two serpentine wall works included in the presentation: Sherman’s double tray with a perimetic question—”Do Snakes Go To Heaven When They Die?”—and Rattlesnake, affixed with tantalizing lures hung beneath its lithe body. Beneath their gaze the gallerists sit, poised on functional works by the Cologne-based designer Carsten in der Elst. Rendered in recycled rubber, the two chairs and attendant table appear cut from the earth, their terracotta-colored forms finding both tonal and textural harmony with Sherman’s work while proposing a site to exercise Marta’s ongoing fascination with, and attention to, art fair booth furniture. Together, it is a body of work that composes itself within the arc of lineage; of the mechanisms of legacy—personal, material, and historical.

George Sherman is a Pasadena-based master ceramicist. A long-time studio technician and professor (ret. 2018) at California State University (CSU) Long Beach, the Uiversity of Southern California (USC), and Scripps College, Sherman is a torch-bearer of and for the California Clay Movement, having been a pupil of Philip Cornelius at Pasadena City College in the late 1960s, and of John Mason at the University of California, Irvine in the early 1970s. George has been part of countless group exhibitions of functional pottery over the last fifty years, but only started showing his own artworks in 2021, when he began initially presenting work alongside his colleague and mentee Stanley Edmondson. In 2022, Marta hosted FOX, BOBCAT, BEAR, the artist’s second-ever solo exhibition. In 2024, at the gallery’s new Silver Lake venue, George presented the monumental works of the presciently-entitled On Fire. Earlier this year, Sherman’s Eaton Canyon home and studio was miraculously spared despite its proximity to what would later come to be established as ground zero of the horrific Altadena fires that came to define Los Angeles in early-2025. Shortly after, George presented Embers (February 21 – April 05, 2025), his earnestly tongue-in-cheek exhibition surrounding concepts of chance in life- and art-making. Post–Fair is the artist’s first-ever presentation in the context of an art fair.