Marc Zimmerman "Blue Fish" Glazed Ceramic Totem, 30 Inches Tall, Blue Fish Finial, Stacked Organic Forms, Contemporary Art West Coast

Details

Description

At thirty inches this smaller totem carries the full vocabulary of Zimmerman's sculptural practice in an intimate, accessible form. A … Read more At thirty inches this smaller totem carries the full vocabulary of Zimmerman's sculptural practice in an intimate, accessible form. A vivid blue fish commands the crown with the same confident scale shift that the artist brings to the rooster in his village paintings: the finial is slightly too large, deliberately so, and that small excess of scale gives the piece its wit and its character. Below it, face elements and organic forms stack in a warm range of glazes that relate directly to the palette of his paintings. A wonderful piece for a console, a dining table, or a studio shelf, and an excellent introduction to the totem series for a collector who is encountering Zimmerman's ceramic work for the first time.

Marc Zimmerman is an American painter and ceramic sculptor based in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. For more than four decades, his work has opened doors into imagined worlds: lush jungles filled with fantastical botanical forms, sun-drenched Mediterranean villages, vibrant florals, and ceramic totems that blend ancient influences with a distinctly contemporary vision. Zimmerman's artistic language was shaped by an unusually varied career. His background as a woodcut printmaker brought compositional clarity and strong graphic structure to his paintings, while the influence of Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin inspired his richly imagined landscapes. Time spent living and painting in Kauai, along with extensive travel throughout Mexico and Europe, infused his work with the saturated light, color, and atmosphere that define his celebrated Jungle, Village, and Tropical Floral series.

In recent years, Zimmerman returned to his earliest passion, clay, creating his Garden Totem series from hand-sculpted and individually glazed ceramic elements stacked into spontaneous vertical compositions. Rooted in his pottery experience in Venice Beach during the 1960s and 70s, these works bring the same exuberance, movement, and inventive use of color found throughout his paintings into three-dimensional form. His work is represented by galleries in California, Florida, and New York, and is held in private collections throughout the United States and internationally. See less