Unsigned

Provenance:  Private Collection,Scottsdale,Arizona acquired from Frank Lloyd Gallery,Santa Monica,California Montreal-born Jean-Pierre Larocque is one of Canada’s most important ceramists. Educated in Montreal and New York,the award-winning artist has spent much of his career in the U.S.,where he has held teaching positions at California State University,Long Beach and at Alfred University,New York,among others. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in the U.S. and has participated in group exhibitions around the world.  In 1999,Larocque returned to Canada and now lives in Montreal. He works sculpturally on monumental human heads and figures and is well-known for his ceramic horses. The horses explore a kind of zoomorphic architecture on one level and expressionist painting-in-the-round on another. Comparisons with earlier ceramic horses are not entirely satisfactory in explaining the power of these pieces or concept of these works and they do not play up the sentimentality of horse art. The ceramic comparison that seems relevant to this work is that of Marino Marini’s terra cotta horses enjoying a similar abstraction and painterly sense that reminds one of the shifting densities of Susan Rothenberg’s paintings of horses,not to mention the multiple skeins of adobe that make up the flesh on the horses of Deborah Butterfield.