Ron Nagle’s sculptures might measure only the size of a clenched fist, but their intricate, dynamic panoramas evoke planetary domains. As the late critic Dave Hickey once commented, “Nagle’s trick is false modesty. He makes tiny things invested with the grandeur of the Taj Mahal.” Painstakingly rendered in ceramic, epoxy putty and other materials; their landscapes ooze and drip, sometimes resembling bonsai tableaux, seductive but inedible patisserie, or particles viewed through an electron microscope. Nagle’s supreme technical skill originates playful compositions with highly resolved surface finishes, their textures spanning popcorn stucco to lobster shells. In these arrangements of texturally and formally contrasting elements, Nagle’s abstractions are both other-worldly and entirely of this one: they evoke a range of influences reaching between mid-century hot-rod cars of the US West Coast, 1940s restaurant ware, Instagram ‘food porn’, and the composite sensibility of Japanese shibui and wabi-sabi. His tongue-in-cheek titles, frequently incorporating double entendres, are more often than not lyrical decoys.

Ron Nagle was born in 1939 in San Francisco, where he lives and works. He began his career as a studio assistant of Peter Voulkos, and soon became a protagonist of the California Clay Movement that coalesced around his teacher. Formative encounters with the still life paintings of Giorgio Morandi and the Finish Fetish artists of 1960s Southern California were followed by an interlude during which Nagle pursued a music career, playing with bands and solo, working as a sound designer for the Exorcist and writing music for various projects and artists including “Don’t Touch Me There “ by the Tubes. He continues to work symbiotically on both sculpture and music. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2020); Secession, Vienna (2019); Fridericianum, Kassel (2019); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2015); and the San Diego Museum of Art (2014). A survey of four decades of his practice was mounted at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 1993. In 2013, he was included in Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale. Nagle’s works are held in collections including LACMA, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.