Zimra Beiner

Zimra Beiner’s heavily-glazed ceramic sculptures appear knotted, elaborate, and almost molten in their playful rough-hewn forms. The latticework arabesques in stoneware clay—often utilizing cut-outs to reveal a secondary, internal wall— are modeled on the form of household plant stands. These ordinary, domestic structures which elsewhere are used for gardening and to wick away water become the core model for Beiner’s elaborations of design, care, and the artifice of nature. By emphasizing the stand over its counterpart, Beiner inverts the classical genre of still life to emphasize the supporting characters underpinning the scene. His sculptures exhibited at the gallery’s Los Angeles location transform this simple, repeated form into visions of organic architecture: knotted root clusters, vines crowding a trellis, or the sandy grit and colorful textural shape of artificial pebbles and other ground cover. A gifted colorist, Beiner’s glazes cascade and eddy in muddy infusions of earth tones, yellows, and soft greens. Through tactile impressions left on their surfaces and in the looseness of their fired forms, many of his ceramic stands recall the clay’s liquid state and the act of transformation that working with clay entails.

As Beiner states, “I examine the intersection between reality and fiction from the obscure to the generic. I use my own language of line, volume, and composition to make sense of the overlaps which occur in the studio (my reality), the home (everyone’s reality), and the gallery (the reality of art).”

Beiner received a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA from Alfred University in 2012. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Hostler Burrows, Cross Mackenzie Gallery, Craft Ontario, and group exhibitions at the Gardiner Museum, Art Gallery of Alberta, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Katzen Museum at American University. He has attended residencies at the Berlin Ceramics Centre, Private Studio Jingdezhen, China, and the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach. He has been the recipient of the the Winnifred Shantz Award and the NCECA Emerging Artist Award and received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. He has taught at numerous institutions, including as an Assistant Professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, Lecturer at Princeton University, Bowling Green State University, and as an Adjunct Faculty at New York University and Millersville University.