KURT WEISER

KURT WEISER

CV

ABOUT

American, b. 1950
lives and works in Tempe, AZ

Kurt Weiser’s ceramic work draws inspiration from rich evocations of plant life to narratives derived from myth and history, placed into highly detailed tropical landscapes. These images are meticulously painted onto porcelain teapots, globes and other vessels. As Weiser notes “the painting is the three-dimensional reality”.

His most recent body of work includes linoleum-cut prints, inspired by decades of drawings from his sketchbooks. He has paired these prints with black and white vessels, relying on his graphic and fantastical style as the means for relating these rich narratives.

Weiser has shown internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Montgomery Museum of Art (Montgomery, AL) the Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland, OR) and the Holter Museum of Art (Helena, MT). His work can be found in numerous public collections, including Smithsonian Institution, Alfred University School of Ceramics, and the Los Angeles Museum of Art among many others. Weiser received his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and is currently the Regents Professor of Art at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

ON HIS WORK

“For years the work I did in ceramics was an effort to somehow express the beautiful nature of the material. Somewhere in the midst of this struggle I realized that the materials are there to allow you to say what you need to say, not to tell you what to say. So I gave up trying to control nature and decided to use what I had learned about the materials to express some ideas about nature itself and my place in it.” — Kurt Weiser

ON HIS PRINTS

“These prints are the beginning of an exploration into 30 years of private sketchbooks. Some books are 30 years old and others just weeks. The past stimulates the future and the present is a matter of interpretation. It’s the exploration into the familiar that is always a surprise.”

Prints are in editions of 10, 24 x 36 inches on a 30 x 44 inch paper, printed from Somerset 250 gsm linoleum cuts and printed at the Arizona State University Print Studio in Tempe, AZ, by Dan Mayer. Oleander and Flight Over Kansas are the first two of ten prints started in the summer of 2016. — Kurt Weiser

NEWS & FEATURES

AVAILABLE FROM PRIVATE COLLECTIONS