VIOLA FREY at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art (111 Queens Park), to January 10, 2010. $12, stu $6, srs $8 half-price Friday after 4 pm. 416-586-8080. Rating: NNNN
Toronto doesn’t have a folk art museum, but the Gardiner partly fills the gap, not only with Staffordshire figurine makers and Mexican Day of the Dead artisans, but also with idiosyncratic contemporary sculptors operating outside prevalent art trends.
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Maybe working in ceramics and in California fostered a spirit of independence in Viola Frey. By no means an outsider, over her five-decade career she studied with abstract painters Richard Diebenkorn and Mark Rothko, taught art and saw her work acquired by major museums. Yet her large figures, with their stiff postures and mitt-like hands, are reminiscent of the cement sculptures of prolific Indian outsider Nek Chand.
Her mature oeuvre (she died in 2004), larger-than-life people, some over 10 feet tall, required considerable technical prowess. After being sculpted, they were cut into sections for firing – the seams add a graphic, disjointed effect – and reassembled using steel rods and cement.
Freely decorated with multicoloured lumpy glazes, the big, goofy figures – hat-wearing grannies, glowering businessmen, red-lipped women with Ann Landers hairdos – have an intense art brut energy. (Dubuffet was an influence.)
Frey’s obsession with bric-a-brac contributes a cartoony, pop art aesthetic. She incorporated moulds of small toys and junk-shop finds into urns, plate-shaped plaques and assemblage sculptures, and big colourful drawings and paintings depict a swirl of objects from her collection.
It may be true, as the gallery cards didactically point out, that Frey was commenting on environmental degradation, but such text is a bit of a killjoy. Isn’t it better to let the art speak for itself?
Still, we have to thank the Gardiner for introducing us to Frey along with other recent solo show subjects Gertraud Mohwald and Jean-Pierre Larocque, all eccentric figurative sculptors who use the expressive qualities of clay to the fullest.
