Ursula Morley Price “New Ceramics” and Jessica Deane Rosner “Drawings”

Ursula Morley Price “New Ceramics” and Jessica Deane Rosner “Drawings”

McKenzie Fine Art

This event has ended.

McKenzie Fine Art presents two concurrent solo exhibitions: new hand-built ceramic sculptures in stoneware by Ursula Morley Price, in her sixth outing with the gallery; and recent drawings by Jessica Deane Rosner, in her first solo show here.

Ursula Morley Price commences her sculptures using a traditional pinch-and-coil method to create a central vessel form in the shape of a bottle, bowl, or vase. Her signature flanges, pinched to an almost paper fineness, are also made from coils and are applied to the central armature in even rows running vertically or swirling around the body of the vessel. The flanges are usually tightly spaced, and their edges have a variety of articulation, variously straight, pinched, or scalloped. Price glazes her work monochromatically, in either rich dark browns or a range of lighter white tones, all with a distinctive matte texture. In lighter-colored forms, the edges of the flanges are sometimes articulated by a darker-toned glaze.

A notable work in the exhibition is a brown vase form with scalloped flanges that arc dramatically upward and downward as they travel around the rim of the form, appearing to multiply and expand outward from its base. In another light-colored vase form with a curving body, wide flanges open outward like water spraying or a bird revealing its wings. In still another, tightly spaced flanges travel straight up the form, moving energetically away from the opening in large, scalloped-edge arcs. Half of the dozen works in the show are bottle shapes, each with a distinctively narrow neck and opening, a form common in Price’s previous work. These range in scale from 9 to 16-½ inches in height, and their variety of shapes, from a large and disc-like form to a tall and narrow bottle with a wide base, to a smaller, top-heavy shape, reference not only classical sculptural forms but are also suggestive of the gamut of female body types.

Price, now 85 years old, was born in London and has been living in a small village in the Charentes region of southwestern France since 1973. She has been exhibiting internationally for nearly fifty years. Her ceramics are found in numerous public collections, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design, as well as many others across the United States. Her work is in the collection of the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Musée National de Céramique in Sèvres, France, as well as museums in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

Jessica Deane Rosner’s detailed and intricate drawings are small-scale and intimate; in this show they range from roughly 7 inches square to 11 ½ x 8 inches. She works predominately in ink but also with gouache and pencil. The fifteen works in this exhibition are from her ongoing “Ruled Unruled,” series. In these drawings, Rosner begins with a single element, a “perfect” geometric shape or series of lines, executed with simple drawing tools such as a ruler, compass or templates. Subsequent lines, expanding on the initial element, are then added freehand. As they accumulate, the hand-drawn lines become increasing untidy, wavering and tilting. Richly patterned and dense, these labor-intensive works have a devotional focus and are completed over weeks and months, slowly and carefully. This simple process has provided infinite possibilities, ranging from densely patterned geometries to more intuitive arrangements of shapes. Rosner notes that she is “driven by the uncertainty of what the finished piece will become.” She cites Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley, Annie Albers, and Jacob El Hanani as particular influences.

Jessica Deane Rosner is based in Cranston, Rhode Island. For over twenty years, she has been exhibiting her work in galleries and museums, including the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA, the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, PA, and in Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art and the David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smith College rare books collection and the R.I.S.D Museum of Art.​

Media

• Drawing
• Sculpture
• Ceramics

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