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Ann Agee at P.P.O.W

Art in America, Feb, 2006 by Faye Hirsch

Over the years, Ann Agee, best known as a figurative ceramist, has created work that draws from historical models while tapping into the imagery of daily life. She came onto the art scene in the early '90s after a residency at the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisc., where she produced a bathroom in tiles reminiscent of Delftware, with cobalt-colored scenes from the Wisconsin landscape; she also created a tiled wall with portraits of the workers at the Kohler ceramics factory. In the mid-'90s, she turned to making porcelain figurines based on characters from her Brooklyn neighborhood and from her own life, including a group that depicted the birth of her child. Always, raucous colors and imagery have belied the enormous delicacy of her materials and execution.

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For her latest show, Agee changed her medium somewhat, turning from fine porcelain to painted terra-cotta, and chose as her historical model the mid-18th-century Nymphenburg sculptor Franz Anton Bustelli, who became renowned for his figurines of stock characters from the commedia dell'arte, that were placed among the confections on lavish dessert tables. Like Bustelli before her, Agee creates bright-hued figurines that are formally vivacious and open, who gesture dynamically and whose bodies twist about in exaggerated poses. They were displayed at P.P.O.W. on a large table covered with sheets of paper that she had painted with dense, intricate and colorful geometric patterns. Instead of cakes, there were numerous pink terracotta hillocks of diverse shapes and sizes, looking like something out of a fish tank, or perhaps from another planet. These formed the busy landscape in which Agee's characters, again based on friends and family, enacted little costume dramas.

The work (all 2004-05) considers the disjunction between the ways we see ourselves in our fantasies--particularly during masquerade and storytelling--and the manner in which we remain amusingly untransformed to those around us. These everyday figures are wearing goofy homemade-looking costumes (or just their daily garb) yet are clearly immersed in the personas they have adopted. A half-naked man wrapped in a towel lifts a rock as if to hurl it; his name is Polyfemo. Two girls are shown awkwardly boxing in Kings, Butterfly and Bee; the title is a reference to their hero, Muhammed Ali. Some of the figures have a decidedly commedia dell'arte feel to them, as with Don Giovanni, who sports a feathered cap and a cape that he raises menacingly, his threat deflated somewhat by his T-shirt and underwear. The lovely Ghost Fairy, cunningly shrouded in a transparent cloth veil (this work is in mixed mediums), is less readily identifiable, with her bizarre headdress that at once resembles both a pincushion and a space-age satellite. Throughout, Agee's allusion to the ordinary gives poignancy to the figures' attempts to transcend their identities.

Agee graduated from Yale in 1986, the same year as painters Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin. Like them, her inspiration comes from the past, in particular 18th-century Europe; but hers is a "minor" art in which she wields an appropriately light touch. Agee remains, perhaps, truest to the spirit of the Rococo.

Ann Agee at P.P.O.W

Art in America, Feb, 2006 by Faye Hirsch

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