NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Berggruen is presenting Kevin McNamee-Tweed: The Weather.
Through ceramics and works on paper, Kevin McNamee-Tweed explores the construction of meaning and the ways stories are formed, transmitted, and transformed. To assemble his playful, rigorous, and deeply considered visual language, he draws from a wide range of sources. Repeated motifs are mined from art history as well as the textures and symbols of everyday life. Material inquiry and sustained experimentation drive his mark- and image-making, most notably through clay and glaze. In The Weather, McNamee-Tweed centers themes of self-mythology, contemplative repose, and the experience of looking.
The artist’s pictorial ceramics—often described as “ceramic paintings”—merge the immediacy of two-dimensional imagery with the physical presence of sculpture. Rooted in exacting technique yet receptive to chance and mystery, they yield surfaces, textures, and optical effects unique to the alchemical ceramic process. Modest in scale, the works invite close viewing, fostering intimacy through handcrafted detail and narrative density, often infused with pathos, humor, and a persistent curiosity about the world.
Many of the ceramics in The Weather depict pictorial vignettes with emergent narratives that prompt questions about visual hierarchy, narrative structure, and perceptual depth. Demonstrating great range, McNamee-Tweed also presents works informed by pattern, ornamentation, and traditions of historical design and folk craft, including tilework, embroidery, and pottery. The artist’s expanding cast of recurring figures includes a searching, meditative robot, a walking triskelion, a flower bent by the wind, and inanimate objects that stir with a curious, animistic life. He plays with scale: horses can be held in the palm of a hand or walk along a tree branch.
McNamee-Tweed’s new series of pictorial ceramics, titled Accumulation Constellation, depicts repositories of images set within uncontextualized, nonspatial fields. Juxtaposing disparate iconographies, these works hold objects such as a historic Bartmann jug, a Coca-Cola bottle, Tiffany lamps, and the artist’s recurring cast of characters. Across the series, he unsettles distinctions between subject and object, foreground and background, margin and center.
Accompanying the ceramics is a selection of works on paper spanning a wide range of media, styles, and surfaces. Pencil, ink, watercolor, milk paint, and black walnut ink are applied to handmade papers, cardboard, and found materials, including a leaf from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
McNamee-Tweed’s ceramics and works on paper reflect careful attention to the weight, energy, and consistency of line. Depending on his tools and the pressure of his mark-making, the line’s presence shifts. At times, objects are defined by solid contours; at others, the line is fuzzy and broken, as if drawn with great energy or from a fading memory. In his ceramics, he achieves this through the meticulous refinement of unfired clay surfaces and incised marks, later heightened by an expansive lexicon of glaze applications—ranging from inlay and layered treatments to a range of deeply idiosyncratic techniques—that lend the works a resonant material and chromatic complexity.
Through symbolism and material specificity, he foregrounds the conditions of the work’s making. One new motif emphasizes hands that reach for or hold his subjects, recalling the artist’s own. Another new body of work, the Figure with Circle series, began as ceramic tests reflecting slight variations in glazing and drawing techniques, resulting in an emergent, searching, contemplative mood. In one drawing, a robot in a landscape dissolves into a column of jumbled lines and color at the right edge, as if revealing the drawing’s underlying structure. In yet another work, the artist explores mise en abyme: a painter paints a scene of a painter painting a painter.
McNamee-Tweed’s persistent inquiry into refining and iterating reveals how vastly different moods and meanings can emerge from the same subject across shifting contexts.
by Kirsten Cave, adapted from the artist’s statement.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed (b. 1984, Stanford, CA) is based in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Recent solo exhibitions include Tatjana Pieters (Ghent, Belgium), The Institute of Contemporary Art in Chattanooga (Chattanooga, TN), the Greenville County Museum of Art (Greenville, SC), Steve Turner (Los Angeles, CA), L21 Gallery (Mallorca, Spain), and Cob Gallery (London, UK). Reviews of his exhibitions have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Glasstire, Le Monde, and Hyperallergic, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Ella Fountain Pratt Award, the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Willhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, the Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the Montello Foundation Fellowship. His work is held in numerous permanent collections internationally. McNamee-Tweed has published extensively, including monographs, collaborative projects, and artist’s books.
