Art Review

Here and Now: Cindy Kolodziejski’s ceramic vessels at Frank Lloyd Gallery are both more and less than the sum of their parts. Although they keep drawing your eyes back to their complex surfaces, their components never resolve into unified wholes, delivering, instead, a steady supply of visual dissonance and conceptual turbulence.

Think of the eccentric Beverly Hills sheik who once painted the hair, nipples and eyes on the imitation Greek statues surrounding his mansion, and you’ll get a sense of the disturbing delights to be found in Kolodziejski’s wonderfully irreverent vessels. Simultaneously kinky and tasteful, her elegantly formed teapots, tureens and vases are covered with beautifully glazed images of ordinary people doing strange things, along with several still lifes that appear to have been lifted from science magazines and medical textbooks.

On one side of a wide-mouthed vessel a doctor examines a patient, while on the other side, a butler ladles consomme. A plump blue tureen juxtaposes a grumpy old man channel-surfing in his pajamas with a free-falling skydiver.

Other pieces feature a room reflected in a serving spoon, a howling baboon, a nude contortionist wrapped around herself and a bent human spine. Although many of Kolodziejski’s starkly realistic pictures refer to the curved surfaces on which they’re painted, it’s impossible to reconcile their brash modernity with the sophistication of the impeccable vessels, which by comparison seem classical, even timeless.

To momentarily overlook the images and to focus on the three-dimensional forms, however, is to notice that they’re anything but classic. Many rest on idiosyncratic pedestals, stand on feet modeled on the talons of birds of prey and have handles cast from bits of bamboo or the stylized heads of dragons. Glistening gold ornamentation and decorative flourishes abound, firmly grounding Kolodziejski’s art in the present.

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* Frank Lloyd Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 264-3866, through March 4. Closed Sundays and Mondays.