Cluttered Heads
An Exhibition by: Reniel del Rosario & Richard Shaw
Curated by Natasha Boas and Jodi Roberts
January 18 – March 30, 2025
Engaging in ideas around artistic influences, exchanges, material transmissions and collaboration across generations, Cluttered Heads brings together two Bay Area contemporary ceramic artists, separated by generations but connected by their passion for work in clay: the legendary artist Richard Shaw (b.1941 Los Angeles), one of the most celebrated artists in his field, and emerging artist Reniel del Rosario (b.1997 Iba, Philippines), whose whimsical and performative work has been motivated by Shaw’s legacy.
Richard Shaw, known for his trompe l’oeil sculptures (French for “fool the eye”) which create the illusion that his objects are made of anything but the actual ceramic they are composed from, has developed an astonishing array of original techniques, including perfectly cast porcelain and overglaze transfer details. Richard Shaw is one of the most respected and collected artists in contemporary ceramics. He works by creating a kind of clay assemblage, in which he takes ordinary, everyday objects -- old books, rusted paint cans, used pencils, watercolor paints, playing cards, and so on -- and through a process that includes plaster molds, porcelain slip, screen- printed decals, and glazes, turns them into extraordinary works of art.
Shaw’s unique sensibility and humor and his combining of the commonplace with the absurd can be found in Reniel Del Rosario’s inventive interactive mimicries of consumer establishments and the re-imagining of historic artifacts. Rosario, who holds a 2019 Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Berkeley in Art Practice, taught himself ceramics in Shaw’s former ceramic studio on campus, where Shaw had been an influential professor and department chair from 1987-2012. As Del Rosario explains “I learned how to have fun with ceramics by looking at all the art books Richard had left in the CAL ceramics studio. Many of them were his own exhibition catalogues and as I was diving into ceramics for the first time ever, it was exciting to see ceramic workradically different from what I thought ceramics could be. We both share “cluttered heads” obsessively making tons of objects in clay and I think that came from just needing to fill up kilns, but also looking at everything Richard left behind and what the studio was built to be. Richard is an icon to me and I can’t believe I am doing a show with him! I never formally worked with him, but his spirit possessed me somehow.”
The works by Del Rosario in Cluttered Heads were made especially for this exhibition. While distinct in the deliberately imperfect surfaces and rough-and-ready look, the works chime with Shaw’s focus on everyday objects and commonplace scenery. They also draw upon Del Rosario’s growing installation-performance practice, in which he ingeniously replicates well-known environments – ranging from art galleries to hardware stores – in ceramic objects.
