The Capriccio Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art, formally 222 Shelby Street Gallery, will open "Lee Mullican: The Taos Clay “ Friday June 15th at the Capriccio Foundation's 222 Shelby Street exhibition space. The opening reception will be from 5-7PM. The Public is invited. The exhibition dates are June 15th- August 17th, 2012.
Lee Mullican was born in Oklahoma in 1919 and died in Los Angeles California in 1998. His ashes were released to the wind at his Arroyo Seco home in Taos. LeeMullican was an American modernist and surrealist, searching for contact with the deep, timeless world of archetypes and ancient patterns. His roots in modernism reach back to the surrealists through his mentor and collaborator Wolfgang Paalen (born in Austria 1905). Paalen traveled in the surrealists circles of Andre Breton; explored automatic drawing through a technique called "Fumage", studied with Hans Hofmann and Ferdinand Leger as well as edited an arts magazine DYN (1942-44).
The exhibition at the Capriccio Foundation for Modern and Contemporary Art in Santa Fe will be the first exhibition of Mullican's late ceramic work outside of Taos, with most of the work on view for the first time.
The exhibition title, “The Taos Clay" engages the work in several ways. The first is that of place. The work speaks of wind and water, eroded rock formations and enigmatic canyon walls. The spirit of New Mexico landscape is in the complicated surfaces and surreal forms that are at once torsos, heads, or gods from an ancient and unknown culture. The work process involved a combination of factors that were unique to Taos in the 80's and 90’s. A majority of the work is wood fired, an archaic method of clay firing, virtually lost in the contemporary world but alive and kicking in New Mexico. Hank Saxe, owner of the Ceramic Atelier where Mullican made the work, describes the wood fired kiln process.
"Anagamas (wood fired kilns) are finicky…The impurities and deliberate additions of minerals and metallic compounds in the clay bodies respond to the firing conditions of anagama kilns to produce a vivid range of color and texture not inherent in ceramics subjected to conventional firing techniques. The results of anagama firings may be pleasantly unanticipated, with a Zen-like element of serendipitous beauty."
The Anagama firing matches perfectly with the surrealist tradition of incorporation of chance and Lee Mullican’s search for archetypical forms in his late ceramic sculpture.
