Chris Gustin

Edge is where solid meets air, volume meets volume, concave meets convex, plane meets plane, hard meets soft. It’s here where tension is explored and where rhythm and gesture find meaning, revealing context, analogy, or metaphor in an object.
– Chris Gustin

Chris Gustin explores the vessel form on a human scale, transforming simple historical pottery forms through escalating scale as a vehicle for abstraction. Gustin’s ceramics allude to function through the context of the vessel, but speak to a sensual “body” reference. The skin of the clay tautly holds the invisible interior while Gustin’s forms surround and embrace that air, constraining it, enclosing it, or letting it expand, swell, and breathe which in turn allows analogy and metaphor to enter.

Ceramic Sculptures by Chris Gustin are contained numerous national and international collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Art & Design, New York, NY; Renwick Gallery of the Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; LA County Museum of Art, CA; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Daum Museum of Art, Sedalia, MO; Detroit Museum of Art, MI; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; Newark Museum of Art, NJ; New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred, NY; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; Shiwan Treasure Pottery Museum, P.R. China; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Yingge Ceramics Museum, Taipei, Taiwan; and Icheon World Ceramic Center, Icheon, Korea.

Chris Gustin: Masterworks in Clay, a retrospective exhibition co-curated by Sherry Leedy, took place at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, MA in October, 2012. The exhibition traveled to the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO; Alfred Ceramic Museum at Alfred University, NY; and the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA. A catalog of the exhibition was published.