Untitled
Circa 1980s

Porcelain
17.5 x 11.75 x 3.5 in.
Gift of Richard W. Gold from the Arthur J. Williams Collection
2024.12.39

Looking closely at this untitled sculpture, a face appears from the combination of geometric and biomorphic forms. that suggest surrealist influences. The surrealist influence is more explicitly referenced in some of Tom Rippon’s other pieces which directly pay homage to paintings by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. Like many of Rippon’s works, Untitled is a hand-built, assembled, and painted porcelain sculpture.

Rippon was born in 1954 in Sacramento, California and died in 2010. A friend of Robert Arneson, Rippon studied with him at University of California Davis and later enrolled at Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois where he obtained an MFA in 1979. He taught at the University of Montana, Missoula, from 1989 to 2008 when he retired.

Sara Eco Conti

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This object has the following keywords:

• abstraction
• biomorphic
• ovals
• sculpture