Adrian Saxe is an American ceramic artist who was born in Glendale, California in 1943. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.[1]
Saxe studied at the Chouinard Art Institute (Los Angeles, California) from 1965 to 1969 and earned a B.F.A. degree at the California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, California).[2] Saxe's early works were primarily site-specific sculpture that employed large arrays of modular ceramic sections. Later, he turned to producing ornate vessels.
He has produced work for major solo and group exhibitions around the world and in 1983 he became the first artist fellow in residency at L’Atelier Experimental de Recherche et de Creation de la Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres in France.[3] His work was the subject of a major mid-career survey organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1993–94, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shigaraki, Japan, and to the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, NJ.[4]
In a 1993 review of Saxe's work, art critic Christopher Knight wrote:
“With outrageous humor and unspeakable beauty, he makes intensely seductive objects that exploit traditional anthropomorphic qualities associated with ceramics. Having pressed the question of the utility of his own art in a post-industrial world, his work engages us in a dialogue about our own place in a radically shifting cultural universe. The result is that Saxe has become the most significant ceramic artist of his generation.”[5]
Saxe is currently a professor in the Art Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.[6]
