Richard Shaw
Artist Richard Shaw’s work is an amalgam of many disparate parts and styles. Both in ceramics and in works on paper, Shaw whimsically combines functional objects with ornament, and meticulously rendered trompe l’oeil detail to achieve a precarious balance between fine art and popular culture, art and craft, abstraction and figuration. While often absurd and always humorous, Shaw is a consummate craftsman. His spontaneous juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated parts may appear off-hand, but in fact each element of Shaw’s prints, assemblages, and sculptures is the result of careful consideration and highly cultivated technical skill. By uniting diverse and often incongruous elements in his work, Shaw’s intricate compositions defy traditional fine art categorization and challenge the viewer’s perception of space and surfaces. Associated with the Super-Object movement of the 1970s, Shaw has pioneered over the past three decades the use of porcelain, industrial slip-mould casting, and the incorporation of silkscreen technology in contemporary ceramics. He has also been involved since the 1970s in a series of collaborative projects, principally with Robert Hudson and William Wiley. These collaborations have taken the form of sculpture and, at Magnolia Editions, printmaking. Working together during the late 1990s the trio of Hudson, Wiley and Shaw produced at Magnolia a wide-ranging, vivacious series of prints which joined imagery and themes drawn from each individual artist’s work with great success. Born in Hollywood in 1941, Richard Shaw attended Orange Coast College, San Francisco Art Institute (B.F.A.), and UC Davis (M.F.A.), where he studied with Robert Arneson and William Wiley; he currently teaches at UC Berkeley. Shaw’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the US and abroad and is held in, among others, the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Japan, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Collaborations at Magnolia
In 1997 artists Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, and William Wiley created at Magnolia a rich series of collaborative pieces. These collaborations came about as the fortuitous result of an endeavor to raise funds for the San Francisco Art Institute. SFAI Alumnus Jack Bowers approached all three artists, themselves alumni, to collaborate on a lithograph, which could be sold to benefit the school. The edition was to be printed at Magnolia Editions, in Oakland, under the supervision of Donald Farnsworth, also a graduate of SFAI. The selection of these three artists seemed a natural choice, as all three were good friends and shared similar artistic preoccupations.
The Magnolia collaboration project evolved over a period of three months, during which time the artists produced almost fifty different unique pieces en route to arriving at a final image, to be used for their editioned print. Each artist had prior experience with printmaking, but working at Magnolia provided the trio with an opportunity to experiment with new approaches to printed imagery. They were able to explore the potential of the collagraph, for example, an intaglio technique that allowed them to create richly textured backgrounds for prints involving collage elements. In addition, all three artists utilized digital equipment to generate pencil-plotted images or ink jet- pigmented prints, which they then incorporated into works on paper and assemblages.
Hudson, Wiley, and Shaw addressed their collaborative prints in the same uninhibited manner with which they tackled individual sculpture and painting projects. All three artists are considered seminal members of the Funk and Super-Object art movements that grew up in the Bay Area during the 1960’s. They have, for the past several decades, successfully mixed genres, used figurative and abstract imagery, employed unconventional materials or found objects, and included elements of narrative as well as aspects of popular culture, to create works that are simultaneously humorous, personal and anecdotal.
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