Transitory Fragments: a solo exhibition by Viola Frey
1523b and 1525 Webster Street, Oakland
January 11 - February 22, 2025
The first time I saw Viola Frey’s work was on a field trip to the Oliver Ranch while I was an undergraduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Our class carpooled the 70 mile journey north to Sonoma County where the 100-acre former sheep farm is home to what now numbers 18 astounding site-specific art installations. One of the other works on the property is a Viola Frey ceramic, ”Mean Man” an over eight-foot-tall, orange, white, and blue figure in a suit and tie with enormous orange hands. That work has stayed with me over the years even though at the time my twenty-something burgeoning artist self couldn’t appreciate a thing I considered to be too craftsy. I was just oh-so-avant-garde, so conceptual. Ceramic sculpture? Pul-ease.
Thankfully, I’ve grown out of my youthful art school pretentiousness. Although there are famed ceramicists whose work I still dislike (e.g. Robert Arneson, a contemporary of Frey’s), my tastes have matured and expanded, and I was eager to attend the opening reception for a solo show of Frey’s creations, “Transitory Fragments,” at Pt.2 Gallery. My older self was not just entranced, but drawn-in.
The brilliantly lit front room of the gallery is anchored by “China Goddess Group,” a collection of four huge ceramic sculptures from 1979-1981. The pieces are of a male figure holding a cigarette, a female with a hand to her brow, a beautifully rendered rooster, and a robed matron figure who towers above the others at nearly ten feet tall. All are glazed colorfully in shades of orange, yellow, ochre, and muddy purples and blues. Despite their vividness, the figures are somber and serious, imbuing the gallery with a solemn aura, a remarkable feat given the space’s starkness and bright lighting. One almost feels as if they’re guardians of a sacred shrine. I lingered there for a long while, surprised by the fact that visitors were allowed to walk in and around the pieces without some kind of barrier in place to protect them.
Farther inside, Frey’s smaller sculptures are set widely apart on display tables and hung on walls. I immediately gravitated towards “Untitled (Bricolage with Goldfish and Paintbrush)”: a lovely, delicate slipcast sculpture featuring the melding of so many perfectly wrought shapes and colors I couldn’t help but wonder at how Frey had fashioned it before it had been glazed and fired. Her internal vision for the finished work was apparent, as was her skill in realizing its execution by its subtle yet motion-full glazes. It seemed something almost alive.
I wasn’t particularly fond of Frey’s wall pieces, most of them oil on canvas, many of which had three-dimensional qualities. They seemed like sculptures waiting to happen rather than paintings in their own right. But one oil and acrylic on paper painting, “Untitled (Black Hand Holding Glasses),” which is part of her “Greedy Grandmother Series,” did cause me to pause for a time due to the strange portrait’s enigmatic white face whose spectacles are held by disembodied black hands as though in the act of adjusting them, its 'nose' a figure unto itself.
In addition to her ceramics and paintings was a display case containing an assortment of tchotchkes, trinkets, and figurines Frey had collected as inspirations for—and sometimes elements in—the work she created in her decades-long career.
Frey had collected many of these items at the Alameda Flea Market. She was an Oakland artist, after all: moving to Oakland after an upbringing on a Central Valley grape farm in Lodi. Graduating from Oakland’s California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), she went on to join its faculty, eventually becoming a full professor and chair of the Ceramics Program. Her life as an internationally recognized and celebrated artist ended in 2004 when she died just a few weeks before her 71st birthday.
If you had told my twenty-something self I’d one day be so completely charmed by Viola Frey’s work I would not have believed you. But I didn’t then have the capacity to appreciate her visual language of color and scale. Now I silently scold my younger self for being so dismissively arrogant.
Ceramic sculpture? Yes, please.
Pt. 2 Gallery is open Fridays and Saturdays from 12-5 p.m.
Solo exhibitions by Liz Hernández, “Población de la mascara,” and Alicia McCarthy, “Works from 2011-2021,” are on exhibit at Pt.2 Gallery’s next-door location at 1525 Webster Street.
