Van Doren Waxter is delighted to open an exhibition of highly activated glazed stoneware and glass works suggesting forms and phenomena in the natural world by Los Angeles-based artist Brian Rochefort, on view from January 14 to February 26, 2022 at 23 East 73rd Street. 5 4 3 2 1 is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and includes wall-based works and a range of recent ceramic sculptures that evince his fluency and delight in glazing, firing, and airbrushing and ongoing exploration of color and scale.
Rochefort’s distinctive techniques, including breaking and building back, produce spontaneous cracks and overflows that appear lifelike and organic. Vibrant oozing shapes imbricate, partially obscuring the layers below to reveal shifts in color—at times iridescent like tropical flora and fauna, at others grayscale like igneous rock and cooling lava. Through their chromatic intensity and bubbling surfaces, the sculptures are as otherworldly as they are terrestrial.
This dialectic is particularly striking in a new series of wall-based works: biomorphic forms on vertically stacked geometric shelves. Each container is coated in vibrant hues, producing an ambient glow that reverberates against the white wall, invoking the glow of work made by Ken Price and cybernetic qualities of the sculptures and installations of Tishan Hsu.
These curated groups of “cups” displayed on wooden shelves will flank his cylindrical “paint cans” and his larger-scale ceramic “craters.” Rochefort’s craters are inspired in large part by the natural beauty and forms the artist has encountered in immersive travel throughout South America, East Africa, and the Galapagos Islands. His intensely physical and tactile studio process and high skill in colorants and gradients—repeated applications of slip and glaze on hand-formed ceramic vessels—
result in works that suggest volcanoes, rock, and reef formations.
Brian Rochefort (b. 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2007) and participated in the Lillian Fellowship Residency at the Archie Bray Foundation (2009). Rochefort's first solo museum exhibition, Absorption by the Sun, was exhibited at Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA (2019). Solo gallery exhibitions include Van Doren Waxter and 11R, New York, NY; Massimo De Carlo, London and Milan; Caterina Tognon, Venice, Italy; Sorry We're Closed, Brussels, Belgium; and Bernier Eliades, Athens. Group exhibitions include: The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA; Sorry We're Closed, Brussels; Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA. Rochefort was included in the museum exhibitions Artifices Instables, Stories of Ceramics at Nouveau Musee National de Monaco, Monte Carlo, Monaco; Cool Clay at Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Regarding George Ohr at Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; and From Funk to Punk at Everson Museum of Art, NY.
