Elisa D’Arrigo / Elisa D’Arrigo

Elisa D’Arrigo’s work begins with an array of hollow, mostly cylindrical and rectilinear forms hand-built from clay slabs — basic forms that she manipulates wet in a period of intense improvisation. The “postures” that result allude to the body in a gestural and even visceral manner, exuding a figural presence. Their necessary hollowness conjures an animation from within, conflating color, surface and sculptural form within the context of the glazed ceramic vessel. D’Arrigo’s process is one of excavation and discovery — improvisation reveals forms that are oddly familiar, attached to distant memories, or tied to an intrinsic humor. In her 2019 catalogue essay for Elizabeth Harris Gallery, esteemed writer Nancy Princenthal described D’Arrigo’s work as “a series of alarmingly potent little ceramic figures that engage our propensities for reverie, humor and perhaps most satisfying, deep human recognition.”

D’Arrigo was born and raised in the Bronx (b. 1953) and lives and works in New York, NY. Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Everson Museum of Art, The Mead Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and The Weatherspoon Art Museum. Recent exhibitions includes, Shapes From Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection. Her work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection. D’Arrigo’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The New York Times, Art in America, Artnews, Sculpture Magazine, Partisan Review, Art Papers, Art Spiel, Too Much Art and The New York Observer, among others.