Robert Glover  

The above outdoor/indoor sculpture is made of refractory clay, fired to cone 06.  "Venus in Taurus" was completed in 2008 and stands  44 inches high, The armature consists of a central iron rod welded to a black iron base plate.

Robert Glover is working towards a solo exhibition of current work,  to be installed at LA Artcore Cultural Center, March 2012, in Los Angeles.  Using earthenware sculpture clays, the forms are constructed by slab, coil and pinch techniques.  The surfaces are embellished with a variety of sprayed underglazes, detailed brush work, painted terra sigillata designs and then burnished to a smooth satin finish. 

 

A sixteen page catalog representing the survey is available upon request.  The catalog cover is printed with duotone metallic pigments and the pages contain large detailed color photos (8 pages) and black/white photos (6 pages).  The catalog size is approximately 8 x 11 inches. The cost is $25 for the catalog and includes shipping.  Contact by e-mail.

Catalog thumbnail view

Catalog Introduction

Robert Glover: A Survey of Work

Melding the artistic traditions of ceramics and sculpture. Robert Glover’s works of the last three decades manifest clay’s potential as an autonomous artistic medium. Fusing the processes of craft and fine art, once regarded as mutually exclusive, his pieces play at the nexus between the two exploring clay’s substantive, structural and conceptual relationship to nature and life. While evidencing a profound interest in abstract form that reaches towards prehistory through Brancusi, these works simultaneously extend the legacy of mid-twentieth century craft innovators such as Peter Voulkos (Peter Voulkos:Clay,Space,andTime-Sculpture.org ) with whom Glover once studied.

His early sculptures of the ‘7Os are fin-like slab constructions that visually culminate in a matrix of wild and tangled tubular projections. Simultaneously lyrical and disturbing, these works carry Romantic innuendoes of nature as seemingly pure and ideal, but threatened and haunted by chaos and disorder. Such paradoxes are sublimated in Glover’s early ‘8Os site-specific installations that were configured in desert terrains. Projecting ancient and celebratory cadences, those minimalist pieces forged a path towards the menhir like sculptures that have occupied the artist in recent decades,

Echoing with the memories of Stonehenge. Celtic menhirs, and of their implicit significance as markers of human existence. Glover’s early monolithic

sculptures were inspired by desert dust devils. Fabricated of unglazed earthenware, they assert a stately but reserved presence, disclosing extraordinarily intricate pumice-like surfaces that recall weatherworn coral or stone. Like so many of Glover’s works these lyrical works are infused with metaphors of nature and growth. At the same time, their stone-like hue and immobility murmur with the promises of permanence, yet bear the traces of former transient and molten existence. While made of material substance, these pieces project a ghostly, spiritual immateriality.

By contrast the sculptures of the ‘90s, establishing an unequivocal presence, endowing form with poetic color. The leitmotif of growth is reconsidered, often brought to an equivocal climax that features primary forms such as an ovoid egg or kidney bean finial. Inverting tales of progress and evolution, these sculptures emphasize the cycles of life’s repetitions, intoning the indeterminacy of existence. In Classic Gas, a crowning Greek Ionic capital form sinks into the stratums of time presented as a sculpted wedge, while technological gears meet a similar fate in Yadada. Paradox thus emerges as a central theme in these sculptures that find an intriguing counter fugue in Glover’s nonfunctional vessels.

Numerous ceramic vessels embrace and enclose an interior space that remains unseen. Projecting a sense of fullness and well-being, these spherical orbs bespeak a world of equilibrium. Such equanimity is antithetical to the sculptures where space is often caught and trapped between component parts, while form plays upon the razor edges of balance. Thus, in rarified moments, Glover’s works find profound equilibrium while in others the improbability of such ambitions remains predominant. With honesty and conviction, his works move from the physical to the metaphysical realm considering the impossible promise of weighing and balancing time, space, and narrative.

Collette Chattopadhyay

 

 

 

 

A survey covering 22 years of Glover's work was presented by LA Artcore Center at Union Center for the Arts, 120 Judge John Aiso Street <Little Tokyo> in Los Angeles.     Website: http://www.laartcore.org   Phone 213.617.3274                FAX 213 616.0303 

Examples of work shown at LA Artcore

Click on any image to enlarge

Photo survey: Collection of sculptures and vessels. Media: Ceramics. Technique: Coil and slab. Carved and applied texture. Multiple low fired glazes and unglazed surfaces.  No.1, 3 & 5, 1995.  No.2, 1997.  No.7 / 1989. No. 4 & 6, 1994.    The above examples (No.1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9,10 and 11) are in private collections. No.8 / 1985 in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of Art. Photo 3: Ceramic Sculpture-"Yadada" 1997. H37"xW17"xD4" multi-layered low temperature glazes, metallic lusters, on earthenware textured, coil and slab construction. Exhibited at the Kitakyushu Municipal Art Gallery, Kitakyushu, Japan Nov. 1997.Curator, Yoshio Ikezaki