Peter Shire

Art Brokerage: Peter Shire American Artist: b. 1947. Since the 1970’s, Peter Shire (b. 1947) has been working at an intersection. Where craft, fine art, and industrial design collide, he has built his career, drawing freely from each area without taking any of it too seriously. He has had forays into architecture, furniture, and fashion, but he keeps returning to ceramics. Like his home and studio in California, clay is one medium he knows he will never leave. In 1974 Shire made the two pieces he considers to be the first mature work of his career in clay. Auffen Gile and Gile Kilns were Shire’s sculptural, geometric interpretation of the traditional teapot, complete with sun-bleached pastel glazes, uncanny angles, and a jumbled collage of parts. Influenced by Bauhaus aesthetics, the revolutionary work of Southern California ceramic artists like Peter Voulkos and Ken Price, and his own upbringing in California, Shire sought to make a piece that meshed all this together. In his first teapots, he rolled these elements into one and found a form that he has continued to reinvent throughout his career. Since the Memphis years, Shire’s work has continued to expand. Drawing inspiration from his neighborhood in Echo Park and the ever-changing city of Los Angeles, he continues to construct his teapots while also branching out into large scale sculpture, works on paper, and even painting (of course on clay). Shire’s paintings, a unique part of his work that he has been producing since the 1970’s, are done on slabs of clay in ceramic glazes. Almost all in portrait format, they focus exclusively on his life in Echo Park, reflecting the many faces that make up his neighborhood. Shire has now made over 500 of these painted tiles, which have become a personalized record of the history of Echo Park. In addition to this work, Shire has done various commissions for public places and private buildings throughout Los Angeles.The colorful tile murals and large scale sculpture he creates, which playfully reflect on the good and bad of life in a modern city, allow him to add his own point of view to the streets and buildings of the city he knows so well. Listings wanted.