Culver, Los Angeles
Karin Gulbran
Splendor in the Grass
China Art ObjectsChina Art Objects Galleries is pleased to announce Karin Gulbran's first exhibition in the gallery, "Splendor in the Grass". Featured are Gulbran's large scale high-fire ceramic pots. While these pots are traditional vessels and therefore activate a deep line of thought within the history of ceramics, here they act primarily as surfaces for Gulbran's painterly and imagistic use of glazes. Across the surfaces wild boar, rabbits, felines, fish, and pelicans are depicted hunting, chasing, writhing, and tumbling, often enmeshed in forest like landscape. These images wrap around the vessels requiring the viewer to orbit the pot to see the whole scene. Gulbran's subjects are drawn from an appreciation for animal life. She experiences this most directly through the animals in her own domestic environment but then interpretively projects her identifications with them into the wild of a landscape full of affect and lying just beyond both the domestic and the merely descriptive, creating art that produces a feeling both dramatic and mysterious. Although it is Les Nabis whose presence is most obvious particularly in her pallet, Gulbran cites a number of influences for her gestural figuration and animal representation: prehistoric cave painting, Japanese wood woodblock prints, Flemish still-life paintings draped with dead animals, Botticelli's "The Infernal Hunt", Soutine, Henri Rousseau and Edward Hicks. Like Hicks and Rousseau, Gulbran's animals are more expressive and stylized then descriptive and scientific, more about the feeling of being animal and becoming landscape then about making illustrative or taxonomical pictures. This imaginative representation is carried further into the fantastic by the materiality of the clay and the emotive power of the colors as they undulate together and resonate with the images. Gulbran thus produces both an object and an experience that uses the decorative legacy of ceramics as a jumping off point to reach for the material force of the sculptural and the expressive power of the painterly. Her work maintains a charged balance between decorative motifs and expressionistic representation, between the clay the glaze and the mind.