Rosen's formally intuitive process is enabled by a complex understanding of historical conventions, composite materials, and chemical properties, placing her work in the tradition of experimental ceramicists including Peter Voulkos, Betty Woodman, Linda Benglis, and Martin Puryear. The exhibition, her first with the gallery, will feature a series of small-scale ceramic sculptures, elaborate organic forms that reveal layer upon layer of clay, glaze, and salt, fired using a 'salt flux' technique, which triggers a self-glazing reaction. A signature innovation to this centuries-old technique, through this process Rosen mixes surface chemistry into the body of her work, creating a solid mass whose glaze rises to the fore during the firing process. Rejecting historical standards that distinguish decorative arts as 'perfect', Rosen's practice can be described as an effort to undermine established conventions about an object's merit, resulting in an extensive body of work that embraces the challenges of a robust studio practice: precarious balance, fissured surfaces, and accumulated fragments.

Among the works on view will be Roil, a large-scale sculptural work of individual ceramic forms, piled on top of one another like layered gestures. Each individual piece is painted, and together the work takes on the effect of an abstract painting, 'framed' in a custom pedestal made of metal. Pieced together, the work appears as if in motion, a swirling, cascading form, seemingly driven by an inner velocity. Rosen describes the ceramic process for her as breaking down the barrier between the visual and sensual.

 "My work represents a tally of touches that are informed by years of deliberate working experience," said Rosen. "My process may allude to a desire to blur contemporary experience into something timeless and familiar, like ceramics itself. I engage in both recklessness and thoughtfulness at the same time, embracing the awkward and the unfinished, the partial and the raw."

Though her works appear organic, found, or formed, masses of clay un-heroically yielding to the weight of their material, Rosen's work is deliberate. Through the process of creating her ceramic works, Rosen often breaks them, a practice that she finds as interesting as the creation itself, as it reveals the possibility and potency of a shard. She fires and re-fires her work, interested in both the change in material as the work accumulates mass, as well as the way the physical material can be negotiated - its limits pushed, while simultaneously pushing the limits of what a sculpture can be.

She has been the Robert Arneson Endowed Chair at the University of California Davis since 1997. 
Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped, Rosen's first major survey chronicling 20 years of her work in ceramics and drawing, will open at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in August of 2017. She is represented by Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco.

P*P*O*W             535 West 22nd St. 3rd Floor         New York, NY 10011 US          http://ppowgallery.com

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