Opening
Saturday, February 15
4 – 7PM

On View
February 15 – March 29 2025

Wednesday – Saturday
Noon – 5PM

Marta
3021 Rowena Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90039

Marta is pleased to host Embers, the gallery’s third solo presentation of work by Pasadena-based master ceramicist George Sherman. Located in the gallery’s Anteroom, the exhibition extends its thematic focus from Sherman’s On Fire (2024), the artist’s monumental show of the previous year, engaging new palettes and forms that, as with the titular coals, maintain the energy of artistic vision and express its eternal capacity for transformation.

Anchoring the presentation are three series of statuesque vessels. Displayed on handcrafted plywood shelves, Sherman’s version of an artist’s frame, each is a landscape within itself; glazed so that, when placed alongside one another, their independent horizon lines are joined with that of their neighbor, gradating, when viewed in full, with meteorological precision. The nine vessels that comprise Protractor Skies offer the 180º arc of their construction to the atmosphere of days while an equal number of rectilinear forms in The Change in the Weather is Said to be Extreme stand at attention, soldier-like in their disposition, as the transition from dawn to dusk sweeps across their tapered bodies, tracing the sun’s trajectory over the course of twenty-four hours.

Tonally, these works are reflected in Kokeshi, a series that makes formal reference to the Japanese wooden dolls of the same name. Traditionally fashioned without arms or legs, these painted figures allude to a reduced, but recognizable, bodily form not unlike the constructions of Vase/Bottle and Evenadam, the two wall works included in the exhibition. Speaking in the language of pairs, these pieces articulate a topography of color and texture that carry association with the nearby San Gabriel Mountains, at the foot of which the artist has lived and worked for the past three decades, and which so recently found themselves transfigured, as clay is to ceramic, by fire.

The twin figures of these pieces—meditations on the elemental containers of Vase and Bottle and the First Woman and Man of Abrahamic religions—externalize Sherman’s interest in multiples (a necessity in ceramic practice, a notoriously temperamental medium) and find complement in the artist’s range of vessels, a form to which he has only recently returned. Together, Sherman’s functional-sculptural works exist between the planes of life and death—water-bearers and sarcophagi that surge with morning light and descend into the soft glow of crepuscular hours. They may hold ash or a single bloom that has emerged from the earth to announce, "I can return." As we move through the [ante]room, day slips in and out of night’s shadow, reveling in the depths of first sun, last sun, and its immortal cycle.

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George Sherman (b. 1945, San Diego) is a Pasadena-based ceramic artist. A long-time studio tech and professor (ret. 2018) at CSU, USC, and Scripps College, Sherman is a torch-bearer of and for the California Clay Movement, a former pupil of Philip Cornelius at Pasadena City College in the late 1960s, and of John Mason at UC Irvine in the early 1970s. This is the artist’s fourth-ever solo exhibition, and his third with the gallery.