New York
Ron Nagle’s current exhibition, “Irrational Discovery” (on view through April 18, 2026), features 12 sly and sexy ceramic sculptures—each no larger than six inches in any direction—installed within custom vitrines across two galleries. Feathered Bedfellow (2023) looks like a strange confection with two crossed fingers sticking out of the top or an animal lying on its back showing its anus. In The Maine Ingredient (2025), a red vegetal form stands on a plinth before a partial wall—a pink corner that recalls an architectural model by Luis Barragán. Better Than Edison (2025) conjures a Krazy Kat bulbous nose and pays tribute to the overtly phallic ceramics of Ken Price, Nagle’s friend, fellow acolyte of Peter Voulkos, and early ally in developing colorful, intimately scaled low-fire ceramics.
Nagle, who is in his late 80s, started out as a jeweler. He’s fastidious, firing pieces multiple times and painting subtle shadows. Yet he stresses his interest in creating finished works that feel spontaneous—a quality that he attributes, in line with his Abstract Expressionist training, to his cultivation of presence and his refusal to overthink. In 2010, the critic Dave Hickey characterized Nagle as pouring a great deal of energy into small containers: “He makes tiny things invested with the grandeur of the Taj Mahal.” To me, Nagle’s sculptures read like precise and irreverent poems: Kobayashi Issa and Richard Brautigan come to mind. In the early 19th-century, Issa wrote haiku about the irony of killing mosquitoes during prayers and the lust of frogs. Brautigan, in 1968, imagined a werewolf at a carnival crying upon seeing the Ferris wheel, “electric green and red tears [flowing] down his furry cheeks.”
In this vein, Awkward Sage and Cornbread Turner (both 2025) riff on oribe mukozuke, irregularly shaped Japanese ceramic dishes often glazed in a distinctive dark green with an iron brown wash. These dishes, shaped like mittens, birds, or umbrellas in the 17th century, were used in tea ceremonies. In Cornbread Turner, a lime-green head appears in profile like a dish stood up on end. A thin purple tube suggesting a microphone headset rests near where a mouth would be, perhaps a nod to—or dig at—the lime-green fashion craze initiated by pop star Charli XCX in the summer of 2024. Delicately balanced and faintly putrid, Cornbread Turner also evokes a slice of garden, a miniature set for a Beckett play, or a moldy piece of toast.
After these works, the mood veers dark. If we can equate the show’s 12 works to months in a calendar, there is more December than May or June. An eerie lime-green infects half of what’s on view, like a radioactive pox on the surface of an inhospitable planet, tinging even some of Nagle’s more playful gestures with a sense of danger. In 1951, Barragán, the architect, gave a lecture in California about his Jardines del Pedregal, positioned on craggy volcanic rock in Mexico City, and he wondered whether gardens would remain sanctuaries. A few of Nagle’s works, like Potent Portion and Little Earl (both 2023), have an element of Pedregal, but with cackles, snickers, and some dread piped in. Where Barragán sought serenity and refuge from the increasingly noisy world, Nagle lets a lot of that outside world in.
Consistently, though, he refuses to settle on quotation. His references feel like ingredients melted down, mixed with others, and recast. I get the sense that Nagle is not very interested in the particular context of Barragán, the cultural significance of tea ceremonies, let alone who, historically, had to serve the tea and who benefited from being served. Still, his work does not come off as superficial. It testifies to a restless hunger to get to know a range of objects from across time by carefully observing them as a means of transforming them. Hickey’s sense of unlikely grandeur mostly holds for these new works, though it feels fragile now. Maybe I’m under the influence of the age—our collective weariness about cultural appropriation and monumentality, even on a small scale—but this work evinces at least an awareness of its own theatricality. Like Issa with his insects and Brautigan with his weeping werewolf, it transmits a distinctly uneasy humor.
