Jim Melchert, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco

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Jim Melchert

Available Work

The Velocity of Cracking (Phoenix Series), 2005
Broken and glazed porcelain tiles
31” x 31”

North Atlantic (Phoenix Series II), 2005
Broken and glazed porcelain tiles
90” x 72” x 3/8”

Light on Light (Phoenix Series II), 2005
Broken and glazed porcelain tile
35-1/4” x 23-1/2” x 3/8”

Red, as in Remembered (Phoenix Series II), 2005
Broken and glazed porcelain tiles
47-1/2” x 35-1/2”

Eye Sites / Dark Gray #1 (Phoenix Series III), 2005
Graphite on broken porcelain tile
15-1/2” x 15-1/2”

Eye Sites / Reprieve (Phoenix Series III), 2005
Graphite on broken porcelain tile
35-1/4” x 53”

Ethiopia I, 1985/1987
black conte on paper
40” x 54”

Jim Melchert has been at the center of the Bay Area’s artistic growth and served as Visual Arts head at the NEA and Director of the American Academy at Rome. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Melchert has worked in a variety of media, including drawing, film, and ceramics. The path of his artistic development is conceptual, and his ideas led him to a unique process involving ceramic tiles: breaking them, drawing on them, reassembling them and painting the new constructions with glaze.

An early Jim Melchert piece was recently featured in the Tate Liverpool exhibition, A Secret History of Clay, from Gauguin to Gormley.

In the 1972 performance Changes, the artist and his companions dunk their heads in clay slip and are filmed waiting for it to dry, in a room that is hot at one end and cold at the other. The body itself is described in terms of the vessel:

"It encases your head so that the sounds that you hear are interior, your breathing, your heartbeat, and your nervous system. (It is surprising how vast we are inside.)"

Jim Melchert’s new ceramic tile works will be wall-mounted and assembled in grids. The lines resulting from the breakages dictate compositions to the artist. Formal patterns built from groups of repeated stripes of colored glaze draw the viewer into the more intimate textural experience of alternating shiny and matt surfaces.