ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Berry Campbell is pleased to present a focused exhibition of porcelain sculptures by Sally Silberberg, an extraordinary and largely unseen body of work that marks a pivotal moment in the artistâs practice. The exhibition is curated by Glenn Adamson, an independent curator, writer, and historian, and previously Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition is accompanied by a 72-page catalogue.
Created during the 1980s, a concentrated period of experimentation for Silberberg, these sculptures are a decisive shift away from functional ceramics and toward a radical new sculptural language. After years of working on the potterâs wheel, Silberberg developed a new method built from solid blocks of porcelain. Layered with pigment, cut, torn, and carved, each work introduces both risk and unpredictability and pushes porcelain to its structural and perceptual limits.
These works challenge perception, and Silberberg asks whether porcelain, âan elegant material hovering between rough clay and glassâ as the artist put it, could instead be experienced as dense and geological. The resulting sculptures are angular, striated, and weighty, their layered surfaces and sharp angles evoking fractured stone or exposed strata. Both controlled and unstable, the sculptures balance precision with disruption, and give the impression of forms under pressure caught in a state of continual transformation.
While firmly rooted in ceramic tradition, these works also engage with broader currents in postwar and 1980s art. Disorienting spatial collisions reference Cubism, exposed stratigraphy can be read in relation to the work of Naum Gabo, and the worksâ activated grids and stripes relate to patterns of 1980s design and architecture. The exhibitionâs curator, Glenn Adamson, calls her more of âa deconstructivist than a constructivistâ and relates her orchestration of chance and control to that of Gerhard Richter.
Works from this series are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian. Silberbergâs porcelain sculptures constitute a distinct and powerful body of work that expands the possibilities of porcelain and marks a pivotal moment in sculptural achievement.
ABOUT SALLY SILBERBERG
American, b. 1945, Syracuse, NY
lives and works in Plainfield, MA
Sally Silberberg began her professional career in 1969 as a traditional production stoneware potter producing utilitarian forms. Through the following decade, she began working translucent porcelain, her glazes became painterly abstractions, and her pots became vessels. In the early 80âs, Silberberg experimented with nerikomi, a technique uniting her interests in color and sculptural form. Exploring the vulnerabilities of the clay material through large scale solid forms and movement in the firing process, her work became an amalgam of fissures and disruptions of lines that converged three-dimensional forms. The tension between graphic, two-dimensional patterning within a three-dimensional structure led Silberberg to painting, which thirty-years later, is a continuation of the energy that grew from the works in clay.
Silberbergâs ceramic sculpture has been exhibited internationally at the Everson Museum, (Syracuse, NY), the Woodmere Museum, (Philadelphia, PA), East-West Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition, (Mino, Japan), the Parrish Art Museum, (Southampton, NY), and the Institute of Design, (Sacramento, CA). She has received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. In 1967, Silberberg graduated with a BFA in ceramic design from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her studies included a year abroad at Nyckelviksskolan, Stockholm, Sweden and an introduction to modernist aesthetics. Silberbergâs first small studio in Brooklyn, NY, the Clay Pot, moved to Plainfield, MA in 1974.
Superior has exhibited at the American Museum of Ceramic Art, (Pomona, CA), Scripps Womenâs College, (Claremont, CA), and the Fuller Craft Museum, (Brockton, MA) among many other institutions. Her work can be found in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, (Washington, DC), the Museum of Arts and Design, (New York, NY), the Peabody Essex Museum, (Salem, MA), Philadelphia Museum of Art, (Philadelphia, PA) the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (Los Angeles, CA), White House Collection of American Craft, (Little Rock, AK). In 2018, through the generous support of the Kohler Foundation, gifts of art by Mara Superior were made to fifteen museums throughout the USA, increasing the public holdings of Superiorâs artworks and including an in depth collection acquired by the Racine Art Museum, (Racine, WI) and shown in 2020 in Collection Focus: Mara Superior. In 2010 she was interviewed for the oral history program of the Smithsonianâs Archives of American Art, (Washington, DC).
