3. Juni 2012 - New Ceramics

PROFILE
Krista
Grecco
andy Gambrell
Krista Grecco is an internationally
respected clay artist
working in the United States.
She recently completed a residency at
the Hambidge Center for the Creative
Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia,
where she began work on a wonderful new
collection for her solo exhibition, Daydreamer,
at Kunstforum Solothurn in Switzerland.
To better understand Krista Grecco’s practice,
I visited her home and studio in Atlanta, Georgia.
When I asked about the elusive emotion
that informs her process, Grecco replied, “I keep
the notions of escape and reality in the front of
my mind when I work.” The artist’s meditations result
in a bittersweet combination, the daydream with one
foot in reality.
If Michelangelo’s “Pieta” is beautiful because
Christ’s face is just shy of a smile, Grecco’s
figures defy beauty because their expressions
are just shy of a frown. These nearly
frowning faces betray reflections on life’s
problems and mundane responsibilities.
She presents us with the contemporary
daydreamer, multitasking and haunted by
obligations, even in fantasy.
Ironically, it is the distant stare of Grecco’s
figures, the very burden they carry that gives
them life. Her animals are whimsically coloured,
playfully proportioned, and without eyes. They become
figments of the figures’ imaginations. Grecco says she
is inspired by contrasts such as “sweet and sour, beautiful and
ugly, and dreams and disappointments.” Interestingly, these
oppositions are made manifest in the work. Sweet, beautiful,
dream animals serve as counterpoints to figures that have
been soured by life’s ugliness and disappointments.
Grecco’s fantastic animals chaperone her lonely, preoccupied
dreamers through the purgatory of contemporary daydreams.
In Seeker, a lantern of red birds mysteriously compels
a figure forward. There is a passive-aggressive competition for
control. Is the daydreamer walking with purpose or being led?
In another work, leashed mice merrily take their walk while
their master absentmindedly follows. Elsewhere in Grecco’s
world, a llama and a lamb support figures longing for escape,
lost in introspection. Other thoughts that provoke the artist
are the notions that “what should happen is not happening”,
and “what shouldn’t happen is happening”. This fascination
with the absurd accounts in part for the unlikely fauna that
accompany her troubled figures.
If Michelangelo’s “Pieta” is beautiful because
Christ’s face is just shy of a smile, Grecco’s figures
defy beauty because their expressions
are just shy of a frown.
New to Grecco’s oeuvre are wall mounted busts of horses.
She revealed that while thinking about the theme of her
upcoming show, she asked herself what a girl might see in a
daydream. A horse was the obvious choice for Grecco, and
for inspiration, she studied a toy horse as an academic painter
might study an actual horse. In keeping with her practice,
Grecco chose to adjust key proportions, shrinking the size of
the eyes and brow, and in the end, she deviated very much
from her model. An interesting fact about Grecco’s practice is
that she works additively from the ground up or from the wall
18 NEW CERAMICS May / June 2012