NEHMA | Collection - White Elephant Teapot

Kurt Weiser

American, b. 1950

White Elephant Teapot
1994

Porcelain
11.5 x 14 x 5.5 in.
Gift of the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation
1994.37

White Elephant Teapot is a good example of Kurt Weiser’s elaborate china painting style, where he covers the whole surface of his porcelain pieces. These are mostly teapots and jars, although more recently he has added globes. The intense decoration of this teapot, overwhelming its simple functional use, produces an uncanny effect, blending apparently realistic images and naturalistic details with evident disproportions and ambiguous elements. The impression the work imparts is of a dreamlike, unsettling scene, where humanity and nature play a symbolic and complex role.

Born in Lansing, Michigan, in 1950, Weiser attended the Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Michigan, where he obtained his MFA degree in 1976. He served as the director of the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, for almost a decade in the 1970s and is currently a regents professor at Arizona State University, where he started teaching in 1988. Initially he decorated pottery in an abstract way, but in the 1990s, as he adopted china painting, he developed his signature figurative style.

Sara Eco Conti, PhD.

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