Viola Frey Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1933 - d. 2004

Viola Frey (August 15, 1933 – July 26, 2004) was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.

Born in 1933, Viola Frey grew up on her family's vineyard in Lodi, California.

She received a BFA in 1956 from California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where she studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn and ceramics with Vernon "Corky" Coykendall and Charles Fiske. Her fellow students included Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira. After receiving her bachelor's degree, she attended graduate school at Tulane University and studied with Mark Rothko and George Rickey. She left Tulane in 1957 without receiving her master's degree and moved to New York to work with ceramicist Katherine Choy at the Clay Art Center in Port Chester, New York.

Frey returned to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1960 where she became an internationally respected artist and a leading figure in contemporary ceramics. She was well known for her monumental, brightly colored ceramic sculptures, which explored issues of gender, cultural iconography and art history. Along with Robert Arneson and Peter Voulkos, Frey reshaped and defined the use of ceramics as a fine art medium through her robust sculptures.

"Frey was one of a number of California artists working in clay in the 1950s and 60s who turned away from that medium's conventions to produce works with robust sculptural qualities associated with Abstract Expressionist painting, Pop art and what would come to be known as California Funk."[7]

"Viola has had a profound impact on the visual arts. She was able to take the culture surrounding her and reform those elements into a totally original form of sculpture that defined one of the great contributions to modern art," commented Michael S. Roth, former President of the California College of the Arts.[8]

In the 1970s, after moving to a larger studio in Oakland, Frey started creating her signature larger-than-life ceramic figures. Standing up to twelve feet high and constructed of separate pieces, the massive men appear in generic suits and ties, while the large female figures are often depicted in heavily patterned, 1950s-style dresses.