Artist
Peter Voulkos
USA
Breaking the pot. Breaking the rules.
He was a master thrower who decided to tear, slash, and stack his pots—and changed what ceramics could be.
Peter Voulkos could throw a perfect pot. Then, in the mid-1950s, influenced by Abstract Expressionism, he started doing violence to his work. He slashed thrown forms, stacked them, tore them open. The ceramic establishment was horrified. At Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, he created a revolutionary program. His mature work—massive plates gouged with gestural marks, towering stacks of torn forms—proved that clay could carry the same emotional weight as any medium.
What rules might be worth breaking?