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“Mystical absurdism, amazing, astounding phenomena on a human scale and what is funny about the way we love and hate industrial things…is what interests me.”
-Peter Shire
Since the 1970’s, Peter Shire (b. 1947) has been working at an intersection. Where craft, fine art, and industrial design collide, he has built his career, drawing freely from each area without taking any of it too seriously. He has had forays into architecture, furniture, and fashion, but he keeps returning to ceramics. Like his home and studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Echo Park, clay is one medium he knows he will never leave.
In 1974 Shire made the two pieces he considers to be the first mature work of his career in clay. Auffen Gile and Gile Kilns were Shire’s sculptural, geometric interpretation of the traditional teapot, complete with sun-bleached pastel glazes, uncanny angles, and a jumbled collage of parts. Influenced by Bauhaus aesthetics, the revolutionary work of Southern California ceramic artists like Peter Voulkos and Ken Price, and his own upbringing in Los Angeles, Shire sought to make a piece that meshed all this together. In his first teapots, he rolled these elements into one and found a form that he has continued to reinvent throughout his career.
Shire’s early teapots were also significant because they attracted the eye of Ettore Sottsass, one of the founders of Memphis, an international design movement that came out of Italy during the 1980’s. Sottsass found Shire’s teapots “fresh, witty, and full of information for the future”, and the members of Memphis agreed. The group, which sought to revitalize design by rejecting conventional standards in favor of a bold, colorful, novel approach to product design, invited Shire to Milan to work with them. This lead to a series of projects that toyed with the intersections of industrial design and fine art, and gave Shire the opportunity to work in glass, metal and other new mediums.
Since the Memphis years, Shire’s work has continued to expand. Drawing inspiration from his neighborhood in Echo Park and the ever-changing city of Los Angeles, he continues to construct his teapots while also branching out into large scale sculpture, works on paper, and even painting (of course on clay). Shire’s paintings, a unique part of his work that he has been producing since the 1970’s, are done on slabs of clay in ceramic glazes. Almost all in portrait format, they focus exclusively on his life in Echo Park, reflecting the many faces that make up his neighborhood. Shire has now made over 500 of these painted tiles, which have become a personalized record of the history of Echo Park. In addition to this work, Shire has done various commissions for public places and private buildings throughout Los Angeles.The colorful tile murals and large scale sculpture he creates, which playfully reflect on the good and bad of life in a modern city, allow him to add his own point of view to the streets and buildings of the city he knows so well.
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Education
1970 Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, B.F.A.
Museum Collections
Archer M. Huntington Gallery, Austin, Texas
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York
Berkeley Museum, California
Colburn Center for the Performing Arts, Los Angeles, California
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York
Fresno Museum of Art, Fresno, California
Houston Museum of Art, Houston, Texas
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Judisches Museum, Frankfurt, Germany
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
Lucille Salter Packard Children’s Hospital, Stanford University, California
Matthew Center Art Collection, Arizona State University
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, North Carolina
Museum of Arts and Design, New York
Museum of Modern Art, Lodz, Poland
Newport Art Museum, Newport Beach, California
Oakland Museum of Art, California
Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Portland Art Museum, Oregon
Sak’s Fifth Avenue Corporation, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
San Jose Museum of Art, California
Seattle Museum of Art, Washington
Skirball Museum, Los Angeles, California
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Total Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2007 Chairs, Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica
2006 Tobey Moss Gallery, Los Angeles
Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica
Peter Shire: The Los Angeles Connection to Memphis,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
2004 Antonia Jannone Gallery, Milan, Italy
Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery, San Jose University
Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica
Walter N. Marks Center for the Arts, Palm Desert, California
2002 Rocking Tiki Paintings and Prints from the Moonrise over Venice Suite, 410 Boyd Street, Los Angeles
Los Jovenes Sunset Art Park, Los Angeles
2001 Winchester Gallery, Las Vegas
Bad Taste Takes a Holiday, SKS Josefsburg Studio, Portland
2000 Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica
Teapots and Drawings, Tobey C. Moss Gallery, Los Angeles
1999 Colburn Center for the Performing Arts, Los Angeles
1998 Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes
LA ARTCORE, Los Angeles
S.K. Josefsberg Gallery, Portland
20th Century Collage, Dallas
Morgan Gallery, Kansas City
1996 Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica
Bobbie Greenfield Gallery, Santa Monica
Diane Nelson Fine Art, Laguna Beach
Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana
S.K. Josefsberg Gallery, Portland, Oregon
University of Judaism, Platt Gallery, Los Angeles
1995 Gallery Saito, Sapporo Hokkaido, Japan
1994 Lucy Berman Gallery, Palo Alto, California
1993 UCP Ueda Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
Morgan Gallery, Kansas City
1992 Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
1991 Lucy Berman Gallery, Palo Alto, California
Modernism, San Francisco
Daniel Saxon Gallery, Los Angeles
William Traver Gallery, Seattle
David Lawrence Editions, Beverly Hills
1990 Hokin-Kaufman Gallery, Chicago
William Traver Gallery, Seattle
1989 Art et Industrie, New York
Clara Scremini Gallery, Paris
Design Gallery Milano, Milan
Modernism, San Francisco
Saxon-Lee Gallery, Los Angeles
1988 Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles
Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Italian Trade Commission in cooperation with ATC, Hollywood
Lucy Berman Gallery, Palo Alto
Parallel Gallery, Del Mar
1987 Davis-McClain Gallery, Houston
Saxon-Lee Gallery, Los Angeles
Dixon Art Gallery, California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo
Citrus in Cooperation with Saxon-Lee Gallery, Los Angeles
Traver-Sutton Gallery, Seattle
1986 Hand and the Spirit Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
Traver-Sutton Gallery, Seattle
Onyx Gallery, Los Angeles
Skirball Museum, in cooperation with Saxon-Lee Gallery, Los Angeles
Installation of the Olympic Village Entertainment Center, California State Polytechnic University in conjunction with the School of Architecture, Pomona
1985 Modernism, San Francisco
Museum of Contemporary Art, Temporary Contemporary, Los Angeles
1984 Hokin-Kaufman Gallery, Chicago
Traver Sutton Gallery, Seattle
Hand and the Spirit Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona
B.Z. Wagman Gallery, St. Louis
1983 Traver Sutton Gallery, Seattle, Washington
Janice Gallery, Santa Monica
1982 The Morgan Gallery, Shawnee Mission, Kansas
The Art Store, Los Angeles
Janus Gallery, Los Angeles
1981 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles
American Hand Gallery, Washington, D.C.
1980 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles
Modernism, San Francisco
Studio Alchymia, Florence, Italy
West Beach Café, Venice
1979 Janus Gallery, Venice
Janus Gallery, Venice
1976 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles
1975 Janus Gallery, Los Angeles
The Hand and Eye, Honolulu, Hawaii
Gallery 17848, Tustin, California
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