This two-part exhibition took place in both of Thomas Dane Gallery’s spaces: In one presentation, titled “Colour on Fire,” Phillip King showed two new polychrome sculptures; in the other, titled “Ceramics 1995–2017,” he displayed thirteen large clay objects. Together, the works showed him continuing to expand the notion of sculpture-in-the-round by exploring materials and inventing forms. Colour on Fire, 2017, is a freestanding, four-part work constructed from painted sheets of polyurethane foam. Two rectilinear elements—in pink and green, respectively, both riddled with cylindrical holes with purple interiors—touch two squat black blocks. The green shape appears to be folded over the black mass, while the pink one stands diagonally upright as if rising from the earth and leaning against a black base. The dark shapes serve as punctuations for the color, a dynamic pink against an imbalanced faltering green; sculpture is often thought of as something solid and stable, but this suggests slapstick. A smaller work, Wall Piece, 2017, clung discretely to a side wall, riddled with holes like some of the elements of Colour on Fire.

King once described sculpture as “the art of the invisible,” by which he meant that unlike painting, where everything is displayed on one surface, in sculpture there can be hidden elements to the form. And yet his approach seems more about rendering the surface visible. By using color, which he has done since the beginning of his career in 1962, he cleverly draws attention to each element. In Colour on Fire, for example, the purple inside the holes makes them more eye-catching. In addition, King had the three walls surrounding the work painted in bright yellow, sea-foam green, and red, such that one could glimpse different pieces of color in the gaps between forms and varied perforations within. The result was a bold, Pop-like atmosphere, making the work an installation as much as a sculpture. Colour on Fire recalls King’s seminal Blue Blaze, 1967, with its blue rectangular masses strewn across the floor. But instead of the horizontal scatter of color of that work (which was not on view here), this new piece plays with a sense of leaning and verticality, with color diffused throughout the environment. It is as if the function of the forms were merely to be an armature for the paint itself, reaffirming King’s idea that “color is a material, a surface, and it has a life of its own.”

King began working with unglazed ceramics in 1993, inspired by trips to Japan in the late 1980s. In these masses, some on the floor and some on plinths, he seems to be aggregating different vessel shapes, while playing with the metaphor of the pot as a body. In Cup Drift, 1995, a fragment of an upturned pot spews a rectilinear stream, and is supported by a U-shaped figure that is itself nestled up to an arabesque. As in many of King’s other works, his ceramics have been constructed with an attitude of bricolage. The hourglass shape of Eye Vessel, 1995, appears in profile to be made up of four different pot silhouettes with various spouts protruding. It recalls Brancusi’s works in its play of base and object—in this case, one vase form sitting on another––but also Picasso’s multiple Cubist views.

The works in “Colour on Fire” follow through on ideas gleaned from high modernism in their experiments with materials and abstraction, while in his ceramics, King combines such investigations with more traditional notions of vessel and body—a figural quality that he eschews elsewhere. Yet what all the work shares is a joy in playful invention.

—Sherman Sam