Los Angeles (CNN) –– In a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the wild work of a nonagenarian ceramist with a mischievous look offers a refreshing twist on ceramics traditions.
Magdalena Suárez Frimkess is an anarchic clay artist: with a career spanning more than half a century, the Venezuelan-born artist has created everyday objects decorated with irreverent images of Mickey Mouse (running over the edge of a bowl of soup), Duck Donald (looking guilty) and Olivia (being thrown to the sharks). In 2015, he made an entire tea set featuring the demented Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes.
In “Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard,” the artist enjoys her first major solo exhibition at the tender age of 95. Suarez Frimkess, who lives near Venice Beach in Los Angeles with her husband, the celebrated American potter Michael Frimkess, has made interpretations of popular American iconography, from Betty Boop and Bugs Bunny to Wonder Woman and Felix the Cat, as well as characters Chilean comics, like Condorito. He has decorated vases with images of Miles Davis, Fidel Castro and Martin Luther King.
Taking into account the medium and the subject, Suárez Frimkess is situated somewhere between Grayson Perry and Andy Warhol. Sometimes his compositions are whimsical and nostalgic, other times they are haunting and a little sinister. But such classifications seem wholly inappropriate for this unique body of work. Suárez Frimkess herself defines her aesthetic as “serious and fun at the same time.”
The casual nature of his pieces hides a complex biography. Magdalena was born in 1929 in Maturín, on the east coast of Venezuela, into a working class family. At the age of nine she was sent to a Catholic orphanage after the death of her mother from tuberculosis. There, the nuns soon recognized his love for drawing and painting and his talent for it.
He studied at the prestigious School of Plastic Arts in Caracas with prominent artists such as the Portuguese painter Rafael Ramón González. In her late teens, she moved to Santiago de Chile with her husband. There, she raised her two children, while studying and teaching art at the city’s Pontifical Catholic University. After experimenting with abstract and surreal sculptures, he created a series of works in which he filled stockings with plaster. “It was a little sexual, like a dream,” he admitted. The Catholic faculty was not happy.
He met Michael Frimkess in 1963, during a residency at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York. They moved to California together the following year, married, and began their creative life together, both working with clay, but in very different ways. His cartoon pieces began in the late 1970s. With these and other works, Suárez Frimkess began to explore the absurdities of the ordinary. “I don’t have a goal. I just do it day by day,” he explained. “It’s like eating, you have to eat every day.”
This is the lack of respect that emerges from the title of the exhibition: Suárez Frimkess rejects any notion of what is right or wrong in his profession. Likewise, he has rejected the potter’s wheel and has little interest in glazes. His pieces have the rough qualities of a school project.
Although his cartoon-themed works are prominent at LACMA, the exhibition highlights a broader but consistently daring talent: There are plates decorated with cockroaches, frogs and toucans; boxes with Mayan and pre-Columbian designs; and compositions on paper and clay in which lines of text are repeated in the style of a teacher’s punishment.
There is autobiography here (a self-portrait of her cycling through Venice surrounds a vase) and also satire. A ceramic tile shows a row of library shelves, with labels of different types: “Self-help,” “Self-improvement,” and “It’s okay to be the way you are.” Art should be fun, the artist once commented. “If not, it’s not worth it.” Her studio, she believes, is the “only safe place” where she can misbehave.
Also on display are collaborations between Suárez and her husband, in which Michael created vases, pots and jugs in a classic style and Magdalena decorated them in an unconventional way. “In her collaborative works, her vessels became irregular and deeply strange through Magdalena’s whimsical adoption of pop imagery and personal portraiture,” art historian Jenni Sorkin notes in the exhibition catalog.
In essence, Michael brought rigor to the pieces, Magdalena brought extravagance. The retrospective pays tribute to a creative and enduring marriage, forged by disruption and tenderness, and the bridge between their two nationalities, one ancient and the other modern. But above all, it offers a window into the world of an irrepressibly animated artist, very different from any other.
Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard will be on view at LACMA through January 5, 2025.
