Diane Mayo: Sculpture

Opening January 18 and on view through March 10, The Drawing Room in East Hampton presents "Diane Mayo | sculpture," featuring recent ceramic work from this longtime Montauk resident. In our third one-person exhibition of this artist’s distinctive work in clay, Diane Mayo continues to refine the art of hand-built ceramics.

With her characteristic energy and endless sense of invention, Diane Mayo’s new sculptures engage the viewer in a lively examination of flatness, volume, color and texture. Balanced between animation and the edge of monumentality, the abstractions possess both a sense of muscularity and of levity. Shed of any utilitarian characteristics, the works exist outside of function or ornamentation, inviting the viewer to experience their pure form.

While perusing an exhibition catalogue on the art of the first generation abstract expressionist, Conrad Marca-Relli, Mayo found herself drawn to the silhouettes anchored in the late artist’s collaged canvases. Responding to the power and sovereignty of these idiosyncratic shapes – ovoids, crosses, kidney beans, biscuits – Mayo began to extract selected forms, interpreting and adapting them into three dimensions. The resulting ceramic sculptures offer the joie de vivre for which Mayo’s work in clay is celebrated as well as an evolving alphabet of new forms. With origins in both homage and appropriation, this body of work is unique in her oeuvre for its sense of pure abstraction and for the finesse with which she has seamlessly translated two-dimensional imagery into sculptural form.

See below for full press release and selected works.