Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to offer a longer look into the work and practice of artist David Hicks.
This body of work is inspired by and in dialogue with the landscape surrounding Hicks’ home and studio in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California, a largely agricultural area. Featured here are structures in ceramic and steel, including 'Slow Builds' -- works that illustrate Hicks' studio practice over the past several years, along with new 'Offerings' and 'Clippings'. These works provide insight into the artist's evolving and ongoing interest in natural forms and themes of abundance, and cyclicality.
Seed is a collection of works centered on what I perceive to be the natural organic forms of the landscape that surrounds my home. While not tethered to a focused realism of natures shapes and natural development, my approach is more a loose conversation with natural form; one that addresses my interpretations of growth, irregularity and the movements of nature. - David Hicks
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Installation Views
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About the artist
David Hicks (USA, b.1977) is an artist who lives and works in his hometown of Visalia, California. His ceramics, sculpture and paintings draw inspiration from nature and agricultural products and examine the formal qualities of plants and organic forms common to the American landscape. The shapes and themes he references in his practice are rooted in the fields and agricultural community surrounding his home. These organic and sometimes mechanical forms are often allegories for the human condition.
He received a BFA in Ceramic Arts from California State University Long Beach (CSULB) in 2003, and an MFA in Ceramics from Alfred University in New York in 2006. Hicks’ sculptural work can be found in public and private collections such as the Boise Museum of Art in Boise, ID, the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA, and the U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies Collection in Washington, DC.
"The work [in "Seed"] is made up of many years’ worth of studio practice; formally, technically, and surface development. There is a really wonderful chronological history of my practice embodied in the work, from the inside out."
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In The Studio
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Glazing
The artist describes the glazing process as alchemical, akin to cooking by taste rather than by recipe. Some colors arise repeatedly through what he calls a ‘resurrection’ — electric yellows, creamy turquoises, and burnt oranges that are created anew for each work, the recipe never recorded or exactly repeated. Hicks writes,
"These surfaces present to me the first and most important interactions I have with the finished work. It’s is the light of the sculpture and it is the most intriguing part of my practice. These skins are delicate and individualistic, presenting the the voice of the objects. They are chaotic and often unrepeatable, presenting chance encounters and unique experiences. They are in essence the gravity of the work."
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Beyond source and leaping points of my practice, there is my love of the studio and processes that continually ratifies my needs for the new. In the studio I find myself working into corners that require new solutions for color play and mechanisms to execute by.
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Structures and Slow Builds
"Slow Builds" and "Structures" are multifaceted terracotta works that ‘grow’ up and around the space in which they are installed. In these sculptures, dozens of unique elements are assembled into a steel armature that acts as a wall-mounted frame; or as a freestanding branch-and-root system on which the ceramic objects appear as a kind of fruit.
The objects are not just a facade over a structure, they make up the core of the structure, they’re locked in, they’re integral, they’re inseparable.
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Video: Artist Talk
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Offerings
Dionysian ‘Offerings’ take the artist’s maximalist approach to an extreme, depicting heaping plates of vegetal forms—some rising four feet high off the floor — doused in thick glazes, often captured in mid-drip.
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Clippings
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Small Clippings
Plant-like forms appear as small talismanic objects resembling branches, beans, pine cones and seedlings.
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Clippings
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David HicksClipping (White Bloom), 2020Glazed ceramic
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David HicksClipping (Green Fruit) , 2020Glazed ceramic
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David HicksClipping (Green Cluster), 2020Glazed ceramic
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David HicksClipping (Olive Bloom), 2020Glazed ceramic
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David HicksClipping (White Vines), 2020Glazed ceramic
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David HicksClipping (Branches), 2020Glazed ceramic
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Library Drawing #20, 2020, Ink on paper, 30 x 22.5 inches
Library Drawings
Where Hicks’ sculptures call to mind fruiting and harvest, his "Library Drawings" return us to earlier points in nature’s cycle: germination and flowering. Seedlings thrum with energy beneath the soil’s dark surface, and floral shapes burst forth as in early spring. Like in the sculptural work, certain repeated shapes allow for reflection on how our own bodies fit into the natural order. Vertically sprouting seeds, for example, look strikingly like a crowd of figures. In the artist’s words, “there is a familial relation found in [the organic shapes] as they oddly present an allegorical reflection of self and life, as well as help explain the passage of time.”
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