Biography

PRESS RELEASE

Chris Gustin: Wild Things

At 73, visionary ceramic sculptor Chris Gustin is reflecting on legacy, time, and mastery. Wild Things, his monumental exhibition at Lucy Lacoste Gallery, presents late-career masterworks from his celebrated Cloud and Spirit and new Sprite series. The show captures Gustin at the height of his power— and underscores his place in the American ceramic canon.

Gustin’s work is represented in over 35 major institutions including LACMA, the Metropolitan New York, MFA Houston and the Victoria and Albert. The urgency is clear: these are museumquality works that both honor the past and define the future of abstract ceramics.

Working improvisationally from oval foundations, Gustin builds closed-form sculptures that tower over four feet tall. Their anthropomorphic, cloudlike, and otherworldly forms evoke humility, generosity, and sensuality. Spirit Series #2503— a tall, tender work whose curves modulate gently downward — embodies the breath-like stillness Gustin describes as “enclosing and shaping air, as if the form itself were holding its breath.”

Each surface is transformed in the kiln, as wood ash melts and drips across the clay. The results are elemental: glazes that recall rainstorms over landscapes, with golds deepening, greens glowing, and copper glinting as they ooze across curves. Spirit Series #2420 glows with bronzed peaks and a dramatic drip of dark ash — a gift from what Gustin calls “the kiln gods.”

Born in California to parents who ran pottery factories in Los Angeles, Gustin studied with postwar ceramic pioneer John Mason at UC Irvine before completing his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute and MFA at Alfred University — the nation’s premier ceramics program. His early recognition included support from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his teaching career at Parsons School of Design, Boston University, and UMass Dartmouth shaped generations of ceramicists.

Today, Gustin’s work is housed in numerous esteemed cultural institutions and corporate collections — yet Wild Things stands as one of his most personal and powerful exhibitions to date.

“At this point in my life, each piece is a reflection on the time that remains — and what I want to leave behind,” says Gustin.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Early in my career, someone told me, "When I was little, my sister could always see things in clouds, but I never could. As much as I looked, I only saw a cloud. But after I sat with your work for three weeks, I can now look at the sky and see all kinds of things.” That comment has always stuck with me, finding root in the series of large-scale vessels that I made for fifteen years. But as the work matured and questions resolved, a new thought crept into my studio, one that was asking me to explore the possibilities of enclosing the vessel form to speak of volume and all its possibilities for metaphor in another way.

Both the Cloud, Spirit, and Sprite Series explore pure form. This body of work has opened doors to abstraction that are both exciting and daunting. By inviting both the hand and eye to explore the forms, I hope to evoke numerous memories, recollections that have the potential to change from moment to moment, provoking connections that go past the intellectual to the innate. By using forms that evoke humility, generosity, sensuality and fullness, I am asking the viewer to seek connections on a deeply personal level.

Artist CV
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