In 1998 the feared and revered art critic David Hickey wrote in Artforum:
How far can you get from Serra and Gober and still be super? And still be baroque? Ron Nagle’s tiny, luminous, pseudo-vessels occupy that position. If Fabergé had lived in California, loved hot rods and surfboards, and been blessed with an impudent art-historical wit, on his best day he still couldn’t compete with Nagle. No larger than teacups, Nagle’s pieces shine, glow, swoop, curve, and blend—each with its own ghostly presence and haunting silhouette. We don’t know what they are, but, clearly, they couldn’t be better.
Hickey’s piece went viral and Nagle’s acceptance in the fine arts, already on the cusp of contemporary art, went into overdrive. His work has since been featured in the Venice Biennale, the subject of two retrospective exhibitions and three books, shown at Modern Art in London, and is now represented by New York dealer Matthew Marks, whose roster of artists includes Robert Gober, Jasper Johns, Rebecca Warren, and Martin Puryear.
At 80, Nagle is still at the top of his game, one of the leaders of those artists in the top canon who now work with ceramics as well. It is not just the power of color and surface that matters in Nagle’s art. Critic Charlotte Moser insists “all of Nagle’s work functions as a metaphor for social history”. His work is a collation of his social experience; many of his titles and invented art terms clearly function as social criticism.
In looking at the excellent group of works offered by Rago, one needs to approach them cautiously and not be sidetracked by their visual humor. As the critic Allan Artner wrote the Chicago Tribune, Nagle’s artworks “give a playful air to an enterprise that is profoundly serious….in which the gravity of every tiny decision tells.”
The thing you want people to feel is something they haven't felt before.
Ron Nagle
Ron Nagle b. 1939
An artist, professor, and musician, Ron Nagle was part of the vanguard of artists—alongside Peter Voulkos, Ken Price, and others—that rebelled against conventional ceramics. Nagle was born in San Francisco and began working with clay while in high school in the 1950s. In 1961 he received his Bachelor of Arts from San Francisco State College and then apprenticed at the University of California, Berkeley with Peter Voulkos. While there, he exhibited his work with the many innovative West Coast ceramicists of the time, Voulkos included. He had his first solo exhibition in 1968 and released his acclaimed music album Bad Rice in 1970.
Nagle’s ceramics embody the essence of California cool with their fun, imaginative array of colors, textures, and shapes, and draw from a wide range of inspiration from the art of Giorgio Morandi and Phillip Guston to Japanese Momoyama ceramics and Hawaiian funerary monuments. His creations are diminutive in scale, slip-cast, fired, and then decorated with epoxy and other synthetic materials which allow him to push the boundaries of what is possible with clay. What they may lack in size, however, they more than make up for in personality and visual impact. This joyous and experimental approach extends to their titles, which often contain puns and wordplay (Centaur of Attention, for example).
In addition to his artistic pursuits, Nagle taught at Mills College in Oakland, California from 1978 until 2010 and received two Mellon Foundation grants and multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He continues to live and work in San Francisco and has exhibited his work at museums worldwide, including the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Secession in Vienna, the Fridericianum in Kassel, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
