Currently on view at 56 Henry’s 105 Henry Street location is Pot Shop, the gallery’s second exhibition of multimedia artist Polly Apfelbaum and ceramicist Gregg Moore’s joint pottery project. The previous collaboration, Feed Your Head in 2023, presented 100 lavishly glazed mugs in a close grid on a plinth with a corresponding glaze color chart installed nearby. Pot Shop is a clear continuation of the fruitful creative relationship between the two artists, displaying 207 works that each experiment with new shapes and rich color exchanges.
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The division of labor is as follows: Moore throws the pots and Apfelbaum glazes them, though they work in close conversation throughout. Mimicking the communication between Moore and Apfelbaum, the vases articulate unique variations and combinations of form and color, illustrating an iterative unfolding. When gradually taking in the many works on view, peering through a sea of assembled pots, formal features slowly shift and rearrange across countless tweaked repetitions. The shapes skip between tall cylinders and squat bulbs, bottle spouts and wide open mouths, tall skinny necks and tapered cones.
On the wall is a color chart of the 100 glazes used, each a glossy flooded square that appears still liquid and drippy. Each of the ten rows of ten squares articulates an alternating pair of colors that progressively shift in value from left to right. This rhythm begins with white and black in the upper left corner, numbers 1 and 100. The next two squares, light brown and dark brown, represent numbers 2 and 99, and the pattern continues. Resembling a patchwork quilt, the ceramic chart is mounted on the wall like a painting. It serves as a key, both bringing us into the experimentative space of the workshop and containing the varied vases in a larger organized system of production.
Nearly each pot is glazed in three sections, engaging the color pairs from the chart: one color on the top half, the other on the bottom half, and an exposed strip of bare, unglazed clay in between. The isolated pairs act as individual color studies, balancing deep teal with bright coral, mustard with lilac, midnight blue with butter yellow. Most are grouped with a few other pots in the same color pair, showing how the relationships between the colors change when one is on top versus the other, when stretching over a curve or not. The contrast between the strata is stark: the gleaming, thick glaze is decadent, like the kind of glaze that should be drizzled over a cake. The adjoining naked stripe in the middle, by contrast, is rough and matte, revealing the natural texture of the fired clay that the thick bright colors are hiding. It also serves to divide the two colors of each pair, ensuring they stay pure and separate.
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The three plinths bearing the vases are all of varying heights, each painted a different color. According to Apfelbaum, the colors correspond to the artists’ favorite colors: she chose chartreuse for the plinth that holds 100 small pots, Moore chose pale pink to support the 104 medium pots, and the light tan of the third echoes a shade of exposed clay, carrying three large pots. A deep chocolate brown, another tone from unglazed clay, is painted in a horizontal stripe along the walls, bisecting the space. Deceptively simple, the stripe is transformative in effect. The basic band of paint encircling the gallery coalesces the hundreds of vases contained therein, again acknowledging the system of the project and entirely changing the feeling of the space. A design feature of many of Apfelbaum’s recent exhibitions, it cleverly acts like a ritual chalk circle, drawing a boundary around a space of temporary magic.
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Polly Apfelbaum, Gregg Moore: Pot Shop at 56 Henry at 105 Henry Street through December 20, 2024 Instagram:
About the writer: Theodora Bocanegra Lang is a writer from New York. She has an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Oberlin College, both in Art History. She previously worked at Dia Art Foundation and Gavin Brown’s enterprise. You can find her @realtheodora.