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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled, 2020"I just use whatever happens that day — it’s like a menu that you choose your food from"
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Since the 1970s, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess has been creating hand-painted, rather than dipped, glazed ceramics which feature content varying from mythological motifs to pop characters and advertisements, from both history and memory. Utilizing sculptural forms, Suarez Frimkess's works share her personal story as well as her unparalleled representations of the socio-political times through which her career has endured.
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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled, 2020"Repeat things. My Mickey Mouse, I repeated a lot, a lot, a lot. And always found that something comes up. It breaks the monotony. It's never, never the same. It is not possible that you can do the same thing like you're a machine, then it will be a factory. But it's always something new, and you always learn something. Isn't that what the musicians do? They're playing one thing over and over and over"
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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled, 2018"People have tried to tell me to make big things, because they think I'm able, but I think that Americans are myopic. They need the big things, like Claus Oldenburg. They have to make big things for people to see it. So I said, "No, I'm making little things," so they have to force themselves to see it because it’s so tiny. Get glasses or something. *Laughs* I'm making a joke"
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"This color has this, this color that. I never studied that. Was too much for me. My mind doesn't work that way. So I just get the glazes as they were there, and mixed my own and I made my own glazes with... I worked with what was already there. Well, working so many years in the field, you have to learn. That was my school. I didn't go to school of ceramics. I go for life"
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"I never put names: it's ceramic or a sculpture or whatever. I just need to do something, and the kiln was ready. The clay was ready. The color was ready, so I was ready to do that, because in Chile, I used to do big things too, in cement, never in clay. I never worked with clay there"
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Her celebrated ceramic works are a unique reflection and interpretation not only of the artist’s own uncommon story but also of the social and political times through which her career has prevailed. Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’ works have been considered unconventional in her school of ceramics given their often sculptural as opposed functional forms. She selects her subject matter from her day’s activities and encounters, which she likens to selecting a dish from a menu. Her hand-painted, rather than dipped, glazed works depict varied imaginative characters and scenes selected from history and from memory, the imagery and language of which originated in areas around the world. While one vessel may portray pre-Columbian motifs, another is as likely to assume the form of Minnie Mouse donning a Prada bag or the bust of Nefertiti. It is this diversity combined with the artist’s playful poetics and humble hand that make Magdalena’s stories feel so ineffably our own.
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“My work is nothing invented: it's all reality. Nothing is made up, that's the only thing I can do. My art is my life. I think it's an autobiography"
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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled, 2020"Condorito is a cartoon that comes from the Condor (the bird who flies over Chile). So every cartoon has their roots in somewhere. I tell everybody he's my philosopher"enquire
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"At times amusing juxtapositions [have] emerged. She adopted a Hispano Moresque form of composition on some plates and bowls (even working in a similar pallet of color) but drawing Mayan motifs and figures. However here there was no irony intended or deliberate incursions into contrasting cultures. Suarez achieved these interesting mixes mainly by accident. “I only care what my work looks like, whether it works compositionally, whether the color is right,” she states, “I am indifferent to what it means.”The style is distinctive. The surfaces are drawn with a busy tracery of line. And yet while the compositions are frequently crowded, there is great economy in her work. A figure, a tree or patch of flowers is suggested by few, deft lines. Color is used with freedom and with Latin flair. But what is most remarkable about the work is the ease with with Suarez deals with a three dimensional pallette.”**except from “Michael and Magdalena Frimkess: A Retrospective View, 1956-1981” by Garth Clark
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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled, 2019“You have to walk the same path, to know the path, when you walk a certain way. “El Camino a la Luz es mui oscuro” — It’s a saying from Tao Te Ching, but I know it from Chile. It means "The path to light is very dark”. I like that. So sometimes I read those and sometimes I write them [on the ceramic]. Depending if my day is very dark I say, "I don't see any light now"
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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
Untitled, 2019"[As a girl in Venezuela] I was seven years old, I was with the nuns, and I remember I painted [flowers]. But I noticed the difference when I was doing those little flowers that I did in those days, and now, it's the same attitude: I enjoyed what I was doing. That might be the secret"enquire -
"I really don't hardly choose what to paint. I feel in my chest, saying, "Let me see what today is." It's something, part of me now. Like people go to church or pray or whatever. A habit that you have. It's a habit for me, so sometimes I don't decide it, and they come by itself. I don't know, I just paint"
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Magdalena Suarez Frimkess (b. 1929 in Caracas, Venezuela) lives and works in Venice, California, and will be the subject of retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), in 2022.Although Suarez Frimkess's artworks in collaboration with her partner and life-long collaborator Michael Frimkess achieved acclaim, her first solo exhibition was not until 2013, at 84 years-old. Her work has featured at White Columns, New York (2014), and in the 2014 Hammer Museum Biennial, "Made in Los Angeles". Suarez Frimkess' work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, among others.
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*All quotations from an interview with Magdalena Suarez Frimkess on April 29, 2020.
a conversation with Magdalena Suarez Frimkess
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