Lady+in+a+Blue+and+Yellow+Dress

Date: 1983
 * [[image:http://ids.si.edu/ids/deliveryService?id=http://americanart.si.edu/images/1994/1994.37.2A-G_1a.jpg&max=460 width="200" height="283" link="@http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=33916"]] || Title: **Lady in Blue and Yellow Dress**

Artist: **Viola Frey** Born: Lodi, California 1933 Died: Oakland, California 2004

Medium: glazed earthenware Dimensions: overall: approx. 107 x 28 x 33 in. (271.8 x 71.1 x 83.8 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the James Renwick Alliance

Accession: 1994.37.2A-G || Viola Frey once said that she sculpted figures because in her hometown of Lodi, California, there was nothing else to portray but the women in printed dresses walking through town on Sundays. //Lady in Blue and Yellow Dress// also recalls the Asian and pre-Columbian sculptures that the artist admired (Viola Frey, exhibition catalogue, Fresno Art Museum, 1991). The figure makes a gesture with her hands that in Japanese and Chinese statuary symbolizes speaking or singing. After her first two attempts collapsed, Frey began creating her monumental works out of individual pieces of fired clay that, when fitted together, stabilized the sculptures so that they would not fail.
 * About the Artwork (Official Text): **

Throughout her life, Frey declared her love of the figure, which sings forth in this exhibition in her watercolors of the ‘70s, her bricolage pieces of the ‘80s, and her tile walls of the ‘90s. For Frey it was the glory of the female and male figure itself, no particular person, which engaged her mind, eye and hand. She hand built her larger-than-life figures from the toes to the head, bit by bit, squeezing the clay over many months, sometimes a year. Her cast figures in the bricolage series, while much smaller in scale, emanate the stance, the energy and the determination of her large-scale sculptures, symbols of man and woman of our times.
 * Biographical Information: **

Known for her larger-than-life sculptures of men and women, other aspects of Frey’s work include her roundness and fullness as an artist, her command of a wide range of media, her encyclopedic interest in life and “things” of all sorts; from high art in the “Venus” figurine in “Pink Man and Venus,” to ordinary objects exemplified by a baseball glove and a globe in her pastel drawing “Untitled (Man in Suit with Rooster in Pants).” Like her monumental figures, Frey, who stood not much taller than five feet, was a giant in her own right!

Figurative art – monumental sculpture in clay. Ordinary, middle-class American, but in size, comparable to Greek, Roman or Renaissance sculpture of heroic figures. Exaggerated hands and faces. Glaze is thick and painterly. Towers over viewer and turns viewer into figurine. Awkwardness, tentativeness of frozen posture. Primary concern is with Frey’s message as cultural anthropologist. World of emotional turmoil submerged in dull sameness of everyday. - [Source: Notes from Curator-led Walk-Throughs in the Gallery and various Catalogs]
 * [[image:frey.jpg]] ||

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page
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