May 5, 2007  

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EXHIBITION:   SEXTUPLETS 

Otto Heino     Shane Keena     Ricky Maldonado

Biliana Popova     Porntip Sangvanich     Fred Yokel  

DATES: June 9 – July 28, 2007

OPENING: Artists’ Reception, Saturday, June 9,  6-8pm

GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm  

Couturier Gallery presents Sextuplets, a group show of six contemporary ceramists: Otto Heino, Shane Keena, Ricky Maldonado, Biliana Popova, Porntip Sangvanich, and Fred Yokel. All are multi-award winning ceramists and masters of clay whose forms vary from vessels to sculptures all sharing a common bond with their keen attention to rhythmic lines and surface treatments through the glazes used.  The exhibition will be held from June 9^th to July 28^th and the opening reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, June 9^th from 6 – 8pm.

Otto Heino is a master ceramicist who is known for his clean lines, distinctive glazes, and focuses on traditional and utilitarian pottery redefining the relationship between ceramics and modern art.

Ricky Maldonado, a multiple award winner, is known for his geometrically detailed sculptural forms. His coil-built and hand burnished works are slip decorated with the obsessive skill of a pointillist painter producing gem-like ceramic objects.

Shane Keena, a participant in several international and national invitationals, is known for his frequently dazzling spiny or encrusted marine like life forms which encase and protect their visceral interiors. His sculptures are enigmatic, organic, exquisitely formed and seem as though nature herself produced them.

Biliana Popova was born in Varna, Bulgaria and is the co-founder of K&P Studio in Brentwood, California. Her pieces are hand built from stoneware, using simple tools to scrape, shape and cut through the clay. Her sculptures conjure a sense of irony visually defying logic imbuing the naturally weighty material of clay with a sense of lightness and fragility via soft lines and delicate surfaces.               

Porntip Sangvanich is known for her brilliant colored teapots and her mastery of marrying influences from Vienna 1900 and Memphis 1980, the Italian design movement.

Fred Yokel creates his work in what he refers to as the “sloils” method – a combination slab and coil. He typically starts with the feet and works his way up coaxing the clay to get the flow of the stance for which he is striving. In the last four to five years, Yokel’s work has seen a transformation from more detailed human forms to volumetric shapes more strongly suggesting stances and movement. This shift forces the viewer to pay less attention to the parts and more attention to the whole.

For further information and/or press photographs please contact the gallery.