Daily Art Moment: Ron Nagle

“Diabolically beautiful.” “Ridiculously seductive.” “Subversively beautiful.” These are just a few reactions to Ron Nagle’s small scale ceramic sculptures. This photograph shows only a glimmer of the iridescent color and craggy surface of Fortgang. The scale feels off too—it seems like it should be bigger, more weighty, but the work is not even 5 inches tall. Fortgang is part of a series called Thin Fins. This group of handbuilt ceramic sculptures feature a thin upright slab, either square or circular, that acts like a backdrop (the fin, it seems) for a coiled piece placed in front of it. This part may be curvilinear, may be bent awkwardly, may be suggestive of a body part or an excretion. The shimmer of color and the weirdness of the shapes seem to belong to another world. In the words of the artist: “The main thing I want is that the work makes people feel something they haven’t felt before.”

—Sara Krajewski, The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art