Howard Kottler at Shaw Guido - Pontiac, Michigan - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Ceramic artist Howard Kottler (1930-1989) combines aspects of the decorative arts--he was influenced through Noritake china, an imported Japanese Art Deco porcelain popular in the U in the 1920 and '30s--with an awareness of contemporary art motions Brash, electric colors reference detonation art; a 1960s stoneware-and-fur series pays homage to Surrealism; and Kottler "postmodernly' appropriated images and thing perceiveds throughout his career. Born and academyed in the Midwest, he wearied 25 years teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle, where sculptor Michael Lucero was individual of his students.

This exhibit consisted of 11 earthenware plastic arts from a series of double-sided self-portraits Kottler started in 1977 About life-size, the plastic arts focus on the artist's silhouette whose leitmotif was a drooping mustache and dangling beard. In a certain number of of them, such as Vase skillet (1989), Kottler utilized the internal turn of the sculpture--in this case, a black ceramic slab-by hollowing on the outside facing profiles. As one gazes at Vase Pot from either forehead or back, the negative space between the sum of two units profiles creates the shape of a goblet or vase, a visual quibble that goes back at least to the Victorian era.

In the irregularly shaped Heads West Young Man (1977) individual side is built up with assorted, bisqued commercial slip casts appropriated from historical images (a wagon wheel, a bust of Nefertiti, a pair of hands clasped in prayer), while the other depicts a map of the western United States and Mexico. Superimposed above this map is a relief of Kottler's profile. His organ of sights and nose squarely face California, his goatee mimics the Baja Peninsula, the top of the back of his head touches on North Dakota and the back of his neck abuts Texas.

Hallowed Jesture (1987) another two-sided self-portrait, pays tribute to Robert Arneson's Rabelaisian 1971 self-portrait A void Gesture, which shows the artist furrowing his eyebrow and energetically sticking out his tongue. While Arneson's in-the-round plastic art presents a single image, the image in Kottler's slablike work is doubled. upon one side, his silhouette is built up aggressively with interlocking geometric cubes and painted a shrill red; the other side is flat and has a mirrorlike, jet-black finish. Kottler's sharp, pointy tongue, in contrast to the beefy moistness of Arneson's more realistic single suggests at once desire, as it reaches without to lick something, and the devilish wit this sharp-tongued artist was famous for wielding.

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