By marrying the realistic with the fantastical and uncanny, Stephanie Temma Hier conjures tension: there’s a calf-hair necktie that morphs into a table fan, popcorn surrounding pink ballet shoes, and a rapt snake framed by orange igneous rocks.
The Brooklyn-based artist is formally trained as a painter and self-taught as a ceramicist, and she fuses the two modes of working into a complementary practice. Hier begins by sculpting a wide range of forms, and after several rounds of firing with both handmade and commercially available glazes, she adds a painting. The pairings arise intuitively, sometimes through free association, trial and error, or by homing in on a color.
Earlier works include a decadent, three-tiered cake piped not with pillowy buttercream but instead trimmed with olives, sausages, and thin slices of prosciutto. There’s also a thick head of green cabbage that reveals a trio of ravenous chicks roosted in its core. While the artist’s depictions in both clay and paint are lifelike, the juxtapositions push the works firmly into the realm of the surreal and ambiguous.
Many of the works shown here will debut this month at Anton Kern Gallery for Hier’s solo exhibition, Swan Song. Nodding to the ancient Greek belief that the otherwise “mute” birds sing just before their deaths, the exhibition takes transformation as its starting point. Elements of Dutch still lifes appear, too, as flowers bloom and pastries and coffee are consumed across a picnic-esque surface.
Hier created the Swan Song pieces simultaneously, allowing motifs and themes to recur throughout. The titular bird, for example, appears in several works, from the feathered chair with thick, stocky webbed legs to the intimate portrait encircled by an array of speckled shoes. Together, the mixed-media pieces create a sort of domestic tableau that unsettles in its familiarity, presenting a fantastic world in which the only inevitabilities are the unexpected and change.
Swan Song is on view from January 14 to February 21 in New York. Find more from the artist on Instagram.
