Chicago artist William J. O’Brien works in multiple mediums, including ceramic, textiles, wood, and metal, along with works on paper. His corpus reflects a playful attention to the expected properties of each material, and a subsequent subversion of their ordinary uses. O’Brien's 2011 Renaissance Society exhibition—his first solo museum presentation—included approximately 100 ceramic works, many of them never before exhibited. O’Brien’s increasingly inventive sculpture work displays a messy exuberance that is, on one hand, distinctly anti-Minimalist in its sensibility. On the other hand, his work resists the sentimentality in the recent revival of “the handmade”, even while using materials, like ceramic or yarn, that are almost synonymous with old notions of craft.
18 x 24", double-sided
unfolded, shipped rolled
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