Volume Gallery is proud to announce This is Not a Plate, an exhibition of the subversive and humorous plates by the late Howard Kottler, opening January 10, 2025, from 5-8 pm at 1709 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60622.

Born in 1930 in Cleveland, Ohio, Howard Kottler would go on to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree at Michigan’s historic Cranbrook Academy of Art under Maija Grotell and a Doctorate in ceramics from Ohio State University. Following a Fulbright grant to study in Finland at the Arabia ceramic factory, Kottler pivoted to embrace readymades and photocollage, techniques favored by Dada and Surrealism. Wielding his unique sense of humor, Kottler found his voice creating visual double entendres on mass-produced porcelain blanks, collaged with rearrangements of clichéd imagery. The artist focused on decal plates from 1966 through the 1980s, producing a limited body of about 250 works, the majority of which are unique. 

Kottler was an influential teacher at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1964 until his passing in 1989. He frequently visited the Bay Area and was profoundly influenced by the thriving counterculture of 1960s San Francisco. As a gay man at a time when much of gay culture was still driven underground, he was inspired by the counterculture’s rejection of mainstream society to express his sexuality and sarcastic wit through his work with visual codes and signals.

The craft culture on the West Coast at the time was dominated by expressionism and Funk, as exemplified by Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson. Approaches so far afield from the wry cultural commentary of artists like Warhol—whom he greatly admired—that it propelled Kottler to invent an entirely new visual language to contain his humor, becoming a notably rare artist using the clean, repetitive, and seemingly impersonal sensibilities of Pop within a ceramic context at the time, rankling the studio ceramics community.

Kottler began collaging with commercially available decals onto blank plates in 1966, reinterpreting iconoclastic imagery to take on nationalism, religion, the Western art historical canon, heteronormativity, identity, and desire. He used famous images to create puns and innuendos with astounding wit and visual literacy. Whether cutting away sections, interchanging or repeating parts of the same image, or combining different images, his versions layered meaning and offered coded suggestions. Under the guise of innocuous dinnerware, Kottler’s decal plates are rife with anti-establishment sentiments. 

An image Kottler used in many permutations was Sir Thomas Gainsborough’s eminently recognizable The Blue Boy (1770). Often linked with Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie (1794), as an iconic heterosexual pairing (him in blue, her in pink) Kottler sought to remix this famous duo. He would sometimes pair or double the boys as an image of same-sex partnership, and sometimes emphasize the titular text, “blue,” to draw attention to its additional meanings.

Howard Kottler’s plates toy with familiar visual signs, shifting the meaning of pervasive images with minor alterations. Trafficking in the language of glossy collectibles, but imbued with humor and narratives of liberation, in many ways, Kottler’s decal plates were ahead of their time. 

This is Not a Plate will be on view at Volume Gallery through February 22, 2025.

Howard Kottler (1930-1989) was one of the West Coast ceramicists who helped to redefine the entire field of contemporary American ceramic art. Born in Cleveland, Kottler earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in biological sciences in 1952, a Master of Arts in ceramics in 1956, and a Doctorate degree in ceramics in 1964, all at Ohio State University. He studied with Maija Grotell at the Cranbrook Academy of Art., where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1957. That same year, he was awarded a Fulbright grant for study in Finland. Before moving west in 1964 to teach at the University of Washington in Seattle, Kottler created traditional ceramic work. Exposure to California funk-a new movement that rejected established art theories-gave Kottler license to use his art to satirize American culture. In his subsequent work, Kottler applied glazes and decals to ready-made ceramic objects, rarely modeling and casting his clay.

His work is included in important public collections including Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York, New York, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, The Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred, Alfred, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C., Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York.

Image: Howard Kottler, For the Record, 1981. Photo: PD Rearick, Courtesy Paul Kotula Projects