Comfortable Shapes

Robert Abrams

July 5-30, 2023

My sculptures are serial progressions working at the intersection of form and surface. These sculptures are deliberately non-functional. Where the potter is concerned with what will fill the form, and how it functions, I was only interested in the interaction between shape and surface. When practicing art in any medium, I work in series. With this body of work, the forms began as shapes common to functional pottery. The idea was to make things that simply represent the functional, trumping the classical image of pottery and expanding the viewer’s expectation of clay objects. Lately, I have added ambiguity to the shapes. Strict or literal representation is less interesting. I have finished many of these shapes with surfaces that invite the viewer to imagine a back story, a history.

Artist Bio

Robert Abrams is a lifelong resident of the East Bay, minus a few formidable years spent working in New York City. In 1993, while still in New York, Abrams began his art practice. He moved back to the Bay Area in 2000 and went on to earn Masters in Fine Art Sculpture in 2007 at Academy of Art University, San Francisco, having previously earned a Bachelor’s Degree at UC Berkeley.  Robert is the owner of Abrams Claghorn Gallery and Shop, MudWorks Pottery in El Cerrito, and sits on the Solano Avenue Association board. Robert teaches at The Mill Valley Pottery Studio. And he teaches at Laney College, where he also is the Director of the June Steingart Gallery.