The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection Sept. 2014 | Page 26

Sculpture is different. It is less safe. The proscenium arch is
gone and it invades and shares our space. When one
encounters a figure, there is a sense that it might leap out,
particularly when the size approaches or exceeds human scale.

Peter Gourfain’s pots are essentially contemporary. They

In the theater of life, the pot’s shape offers a kind of

carry no particular baggage from the ceramic past. His

proscenium arch that protects us from a full-frontal

manner of surface handling on pots is tied to banded

assault of its content. It is like being an audience in

decoration. Certain motifs are repeated with slight

a theater. The play may be engrossing, but the line

changes all the way around the pot, which encourages

between viewer and actor is not (usually) broken.

viewers to involve themselves in the circular process. For

In this sense, reading a pot is more like viewing a

some reason I always think of the merry-go-round when

painting except that a pot is in the round. It is kinetic

I look at his work. The two pots, Untitled #2 from the

in that the line moves to the edge of a silhouette

series Ohio Pot (1980) and Untitled (1985), both employ

and then swoops around to the other side.

the illustrative device, the former in black oxide. The
relief carving of the latter, drawn from woodblock-like
imagery evokes nostalgia for the 1930s when this style
was popular, particularly in book illustration and with
social issues such as trade unions and workers’ rights.

Sculpture is different. It is less safe. The proscenium arch
is gone and it invades and shares our space. When
one encounters a figure, there is a sense that it might
leap out, particularly when the size approaches or
exceeds human scale. Our bodies therefore become

I have dealt with the vessels separately not just because

complicit with the sculpture. The two bodies meet

it brings together a single family of forms. Pottery is not

halfway in a mediated space between reality and

different in that it is lesser than sculpture, but because

imagination. This is theater in the round where there

some of its tools of visual appreciation are singular.

is little separation between audience and actor.

Pottery owns an independent aesthetic built up over
14,000 years of service and evolution. One does
not read a pot with figures the same way one reads
a human-scale figurative sculpture or a painting.

It is helpful to make a distinction and divide the works
of the Hootkin collection into two parts: Those that
are collaborations between form and painting—the
painted figure—and those that remain essentially

Pots offer intimacy that comes with their familiar

monochrome in a more classical sculptural tradition—

domestic role. In that sense pottery feels safer than

the earth figure. The one deals with danse carnaval

a lot of other contemporary art, which can appear

and the other with danse macabre, or light vs. dark.

aggressive and intimidating. Bear in mind that almost
every pot shape and function comes from two pr imal
functions, serving food and storing it. And even when
a pot is not meant for use, such as the lidded vessels of
Kraus and Eberle, they still link to this functional root.

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THE PAINTED FIGURE
In the Hootkin collection, the starting point for the painted
figure is Michael Lucero. He is the core sculptor in this part
of the collection, the same anchor for sculpture that Kraus is