Cup

Cupappears to be a ceramic object held aloft by sticks and string. In fact, it is made entirely of glazed porcelain skilfully fabricated to resemble the forms and surfaces of these other materials. The sculpture is important historically because it was included in a seminal exhibition of work by Richard Shaw and Robert Hudson at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Simply entitled Ceramics, the show represented a key breakthrough for West Coast ceramics, representing a crossover between craft and sculpture. Among the other objects in the 1973 exhibition was the much-reproduced S on a Pillow,which shares Cup's seemingly precarious stacked construction. Both works exemplify Shaw's engagement with the proto-postmodernist bricolage aesthetic that was then much in the air.