viola frey, ‘pink amazon nude,’ 1988-1989

The present lot is an exceptional example among the iconic large-scale figural ceramic sculptures the artist Viola Frey is most renowned for. Long heralded as an influential figure on the forefront of twentieth-century American ceramic artwork, Frey’s figural pieces are most often covered with vibrant glazes, applied with striking brushstrokes that recall her early training as a painter under Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko. This vibrancy of palette, combined with textured surfaces and exaggerated, disproportionate physical features, assemble into hulking, formidable forms, supplying more than ample substance for discussion about their evocative intent.

According to Frey, the men in suits were always about power: the power to do good and the power to do bad. Her women, in the anachronistic flower-printed dresses and hats, were also about power, referencing the controlling women from Frey’s childhood who ran the homestead of her family’s grape ranch, or the neatly-appointed, well-traveled women of independence who inspired Frey from the pages of National Geographic. Such monumental figural works formed the basis of her solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1984. It would follow that just a few years later, Frey’s nudes would be an extension of this power exploration. They embodied, in her own words, the power of nakedness, despite the inherent vulnerabilities associated with being denuded. While the clothed figures conveyed power through their attire as a form of mask, the nudes conveyed power by simply being.

Frey’s first foray into nude figural sculpture was with men, in response to the AIDS epidemic and the death of her assistant, Kevin Anderson, who was the subject of her first large-scale nude work. The female nudes came second, an interestingly circuitous arrival at one of the most prevalent subjects of the art historical canon. At the time they were first shown, much art criticism circled around her positioning of the nudes, particularly the males, as reclining powerless, but in essence, the opposite is true: even when lying down the figures are commanding. Frey compared her female nudes to statues of Greek goddesses, wherein their sexuality is de-eroticized by displaying them in equal scale to the men and with as much hyper-vibrant presence. In this way, Frey shifts the power to be directly held by the subject, without external interventions.

Pink Amazon Nude is one of the first female nude reclining figures Frey made. It was originally commissioned as an outdoor, poolside sculpture for a private residence in Rancho Mirage designed by the famed architect William F. Cody. Two preparatory drawings and a corresponding hand-built female nude sculpture reside in the permanent collection of The Palm Springs Art Museum. A related work, Pink Nude Woman (1989), is held in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Ceramic artworks by Viola Frey are housed in the permanent collections of over seventy institutions internationally, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Shigaraki Ceramic Sculpture Park, Shiga, Japan. She was most recently the subject of an exhibition at The Pit Palm Springs, a gallery program dedicated to groundbreaking 20th-century and contemporary artwork, a testament to the enduring relevance and longevity of Frey’s practice.