ART REVIEW : Peter Shire Spins His Platter Magic at Municipal Gallery Show

Peter Shire is the teapot king of Los Angeles. For nearly a decade he’s been toying with every imaginable combination and permutation of the theme. Basic structural components of a vertical support and lateral members (spout and handle) mutate into teapot guitars, teapot weather vanes and accordion towers that look like futuristic ziggurats.

“Peter Shire: Ceramic Freeways, A Ten-Year Retrospective” at the Municipal Art Gallery (to Sept. 18) allows us to view the evolution from recognizable functional object (a tame-looking 1970 teapot of his mother’s) to myriad eccentric variations. For example, in “Scorpion, David Smith” (1983), the spout becomes a coiling stinger of neatly wedged triangles and the handle is one of Smith’s “Cubis” made from snappy, teetering discs. “Sengai” (1982), with its misty green “head,” looks like a cartoon bird or an alien spacecraft.

Whatever his medium, Shire is an instinctive colorist with a cultivated sense of space harmonies; several drawings on paper are downright elegant. And you can’t fault him for making a career of pleasurable geometry. (Cezanne sent artists to the basic cone, rod and sphere, and Matisse said art should be like a comfortable chair.)

On the other hand, this many teapots in one place weighs heavily and the artist’s studio reproduced in the gallery is definitely overkill. The real treat comes from portraits painted with black paint on shiny white platters. Sometimes crisp and contoured, sometimes tonal and soft as a pencil sketch (like the beautiful “Lilly”), the portraits show a flip side of Shire and celebrate L.A.’s special ethnicity and lively street scene.

Exhibited with Shire are five artists working in clay. When you walk in this exhibit you’re confronted with the powerful, lean clay, wood and steel shapes of Sana Krusoe. Two enormous blades like the fins of a giant sea creature are suspended from the ceiling, several discs are arranged in quiet groupings and tusk-like protrusions jut out from the floor, arcing skyward.

Marsha Judd crafts trios of large boulder shapes that she hand-burnishes to a high ebony-brown polish. If Judd strikes a reflective, Oriental chord, Steven Riddler catapults his series of 40 masks into the political area. The faces, not remarkable for their execution, pay tribute to gifted men who have died of AIDS.

With a whimsical entry door that looks like a veritable crack in space, Luis Bermudez leads us into “Recuerdos de los Elementos,” a small room containing wall-mounted childhood remembrances of nature: a crinkly benign sun or a stark, black bolt of lightning. Finally Julia Klemek’s large pastel-toned works are vaguely anthropomorphic, recalling standing or reclining figures made from corrugated paper or crumpled fabric. Like Shire, these artists test the transformational limits of clay. Some, like Krusoe, succeed admirably.