NEW YORK, NY.- Spencer Throckmorton has announced a special exhibition of master ceramic artist Marc Leuthold’s (b. 1962) acclaimed porcelain and stoneware sculptures during the Spring 2018 Asia show at
Throckmorton Fine Art galleries in New York. The show is on view from March 1 to April 28 2018.
Throckmorton says, “Marc Leuthold’s sculptures have entered the collections of the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums and the Museum of Art and Design. In 2017 Marc Leuthold spent three months as the awardee of a Blanc de Chine Artist’s Residency at the Wanqi Art Center. The award was sponsored by the Yishu-8 Foundation and Adam Yu of Beijing. Leuthold was nominated for the residency by artist and Dean Maiming of Tsinghua University, Beijing. We are delighted to be able to showcase this master ceramicist’s works.”
In an essay by Phong Bui on the occasion of the 2010 mid-career retrospective at Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri, the writer said that one of the most striking features of Marc Leuthold’s legacy is that he has managed to carve out a unique space within a set of boundaries that has redefined how ceramic as a medium and the artists who work with it are perceived. And while most of Leuthold’s contemporaries are focused on their own contributions to the canon of Western art history, his work seems to extrapolate and spin off from the Far East, with its philosophical attributes that least stress the notion of assertive individualism. At the same time, his work has to be seen as a personal negotiation rather than a literal or even ironic appropriation, which often is considered the norm by today’s popular consensus. Not to mention the tension it would create if one were to place Leuthold’s work in the context of cultural production and the whole global economy of art, which has elevated the democratic values of late capitalism while marginalizing most of the indigenous cultures, whose lineages benefit from an unbroken continuity of tradition. And yet, multiculturalism has opened up possibilities for artists from non-European cultures to focus on the resources that derive from their own cultural heritages.
With its distinct Asian-inspired countenance, Leuthold’s ceramic, bronze and glass sculpture generally take the form of a funnel, wheel or circle shape. He also has won acclaim for site-specific installations he has created using a wide range of invented forms and different treatments of unconventional pedestals, sometimes hanging off the ceiling or suspended in mid-air like a constellation or resting carefully on thin metal rods, mixing a variety of heights and spacing.
In a review of a recent show of Leuthold’s works, featured on the cover of NEW CERAMICS magazine, Dr. Walter Lokau notes that Leuthold gives his delicately worked pieces a shimmering poetry that makes them metaphors for change in all materials and forms. He adds that “The masterly passion of these works never degenerates into handicraft: with an intuitive sureness of touch Leuthold dematerialises by his craftsmanship the almost relic-like forms that emerge, which neither hide nor highlight the fact of their making but simply retain the transitory nature of their material form as their theme and beguilingly elude the conventional terminology of opposites – neither natural nor artificial, neither representational nor abstract, in motion yet unyielding, both alive and anorganic, vortex-like, seemingly rotating forms filled with internal movement, resembling fractals, of great potential associative force, perfect and open-ended at once.”
Critic John Perreault has remarked: “One looks and looks for artists who break up history, who bend the descent, who force one to connect the dots in new ways, even turn away from, some. Leuthold is one of these.”
In another essay, Mario Cutajar says that “The one quality that distinguishes Leuthold’s work for me is its uncommon refinement, a quality ill at ease with the coarse expectations of a democratic age but all the more valuable as the residue of an aristocratic one. In the end, therefore, I do not associate his objects with any particular thing but with something more diffuse, a delicacy of taste that conjures up an entire fabulous kingdom founded on good form.”
The son of European immigrants, Leuthold was raised near New York and has always been enlightened by cross-cultural experiences. His work strongly reflects a Far East influence as well as clear references to Africa and the Mediterranean. Leuthold is a professor at the State University of New York and has taught at Princeton University and the Parsons School of Design. He is one of forty Americans who is an elected lifetime member of the International Academy of Ceramics. He holds an AB, Fine Arts from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia and an MFA from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Marc Leuthold sculpture has been exhibited in noted galleries in the United States as well as Germany, Serbia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Hungary, Sydney, Turkey, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Canada and France.
