Fresh from a preview at NADA New York last month, Marta is delighted to bring Box Works—a series of recent ceramic works by Brooklyn-based artist Isabel Rower—to Los Angeles audiences to engage with and experience. This grouping, positioned in the gallery’s Anteroom, maintains the thematic focus of its initial exhibition—that of female artists whose practices represent one node in a multi-generational artist lineage—and continues to highlight the gallery’s interest in exploring the tracing of parent-offspring genealogy as it relates to zeitgeist, imprinting, and the proverbial passing of the baton.
The gallery first encountered the ceramic work of Isabel Rower via the output of her mother, the artist Maria Robledo. In this new body of work from the younger Rower—who showed an early, related functional sculpture at Marta’s Make–Do exhibition in New York last spring—the artist uses discarded cardboard from her and her mother’s clay orders to make interior frameworks for stoneware pieces whose end forms gently suggest the very same material that define their structure: [cardboard] boxes. By materially abstracting their modest source, Rower engages with a kind of trompe-l’œil: one that disguises furniture as sculpture (and-vice-versa), and presents one medium play-acting as another.
Through this process, the artist confounds viewers’ tactile expectations of her work, causing surprise and delight when hand and seat are met with the firm, cool response of ceramic rather than the temperate pliability of the paper product each are camouflaged as, imitating their material assumption with ease and a touch of humor. Realized in warm tones of brown, Rower’s floor works appear both grounded and weightless, the suggestion of air beneath their softened angles providing a counter to the heft of their scale and composition. The subtle glow emanating from Box Lamp and the twin invitations from Box Chair 2 and 3, encouraging us to sit and enjoy their grounding repose, cue our relationship to these works and their participation in patterns of domestic living: a seamless integration into daily ritual that sustains as the hours unfold.
