Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Ceramics, music
Website: ronnagle.net
Ron Nagle was born in 1939 in San Francisco, where he continues to live and work. He received his BFA from San Francisco State College in 1961, with a focus in ceramics, and went on to apprentice with the pioneering ceramic artist Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught ceramics at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts and Crafts, and UC Berkeley from 1961 to 1978, and was a professor at Mills College from 1978 to 2010. He is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, and the National Gallery of Australia, among others.
Nagle is also a musician and songwriter. In 1965 he co-founded the San Francisco rock band The Mystery Trend. His 1970 album Bad Rice, released on Warner Bros., was reissued by Omnivore Recordings in 2015. He wrote “Don’t Touch Me There” for The Tubes and worked as a sound designer on William Friedkin’s film The Exorcist.
Nagle works in ceramics, producing small-scale sculptures — typically between two and seven inches in any direction — of extraordinary material complexity. He slip-casts low-fire earthenware forms, then layers traditional and non-traditional glazes, china paint, epoxy resin, catalyzed polyurethane, and metallic finishes, sometimes spraying 20 or more coats to achieve the depth and saturation he is after. Despite the work’s three-dimensionality, Nagle approaches every piece from a “flat point of view” — thinking like a painter, attending to the picture plane. His sources are deliberately incongruous: Giorgio Morandi and Phillip Guston, Japanese Momoyama ceramics, 1940s American restaurant ware, hot rod car culture, cartoons, Instagram food photography, and Hawaiian funerary monuments. The result is work that looks simultaneously like something from another civilization and entirely of this one — seductive, strange, and technically irreducible. Nagle’s sculptures are “quietly riotous, absurdist but technically virtuosic,” with a deceptively modest scale, that “pulls you in close and then punches you on the nose.”
Irrational Discovery (2026) Twelve new sculptures made over the past three years at Matthew Marks Gallery, NY.
Ron Nagle: A Survey Exhibition (2020) — retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the most comprehensive survey of his career to date
The Encyclopedic Palace (2013) — thirty ceramics included in Massimiliano Gioni’s central exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale
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