ART

Although Bay Area sculptors Robert Hudson and Richard Shaw have each pursued individual works that have brought them great distinction and honor, they have also periodically worked together since 1971. Exploring a variety of media with a concentration on glazed porcelains and mixed media prints, they brought their own skills and approach to working as they assisted and advised each other, collaborating to create inventive and wonderfully improvisational works.

The School of Art and Design is delighted to present a selection of these cooperative works in this special showing. Included in this exhibition will be sculpture for their early studios in Stinson Beach and Sausalito, work created as port of a residency project at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts (1997), and a selection of prints pulled that same year at Magnolia Editions in Oakland. William T. Wiley was a third collaborator on these collagraph and mixed media prints.

The works reference an ad-hoc and assemblage aesthetic, as the artists used commonplace objects from daily life, making molds and slip-casting them in porcelain before combining the disparate components into personal and idiosyncratic sculptures. Impeccably - and sometimes incredibly - balanced, these works are all based on fundamentally functional containers, yet oftem so disguised that the purposeful utility of the object is backgrounded. The meticulous quality of their craftsmanship, often enhanced with overglazes, decals, and painterly illusion, is revealed through both abstract and realistic forms.