Irv Tepper Recent Sculpture
October 13 - November 3, 2005
"Throughout Tepper's career, he has relished the power of an object to express experience. Tepper allows the object to reveal its story in various ways. His drawings of porcelain cups instruct by way of extensive text. His ceramics unveil their secrets in a purely visual manner."
Paul Schimmel
Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art
Los Angeles, CA
"His story – and Tepper is fond of stories – is that he was initially fascinated by a mass-produced cup that had a crooked handle: somehow, this standardized form was not standard. It had been made imperfectly. Imperfection is a surprise, a divergence – and therefore more visually intriguing than perfection, which matches a given expectation. Tepper chooses imperfection for its formal interest and for its implications."
"Tepper has taken a quotidian, bourgeois form, one seldom noticed in particular, one designed for convenience and economy, and turned it into an image of damage and instability and at the same time an image of endurance, transformation and perhaps even purity."
Janet Koplos
Senior Editor
Art in America
New York, NY