SLIP
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY,
October 10 – November 16, 2013
“In her latest, largely terrific exhibition, Arlene Shechet continues to expand upon the ceramic vessel as a one-stop art medium that combines painting and sculpture while pushing her work in increasingly diverse directions, with exuberant polymorphous, often comic results.”
Ms. Shechet's glazed surfaces continue to astound. Some are full of painterly pentimenti. Others proffer strangely textured monochromes - the result of repeated firings — that look a bit like terry cloth, or fossilized moss. This surface blazes coral in "No Noise," which evokes a flailing hot-water bottle and also an abstract SpongeBob SquarePants and has a large-pored proboscis-like bump. The same surface prevails as an elegant buff in a piece fittingly titled "Naked and as a subtle tone-shifting brown in "Out and Out." Here two sagging cylinders are strapped together in an intimate embrace reminiscent of kimono-clad lovers. In the white No Matter What," the white glaze has contracted into tiny beads, resembling a fine layer of lace, or sweat.
