CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/19/2024

A laid-back blockbuster for Magdalena Suarez Frimkess—at last

"Mickey Mouse Circus Jar with Minnie Mouse Finial" (2008) is from Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard—published to accompany the first-ever museum exhibition the of 95-year-old, L.A.-based, Venezuelan-born artist—on view now at LACMA. “When assembled together, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s ceramics offer the tantalizing feeling of stepping inside a funky and cluttered curio storefront and being transported back in time,” essayist Jenni Sorkin writes. “Produced in a variety of clay bodies, colors, shapes and sizes, her figurines of funny animals and characters are hand-rendered, appropriated from mid-twentieth-century comic strips, cartoons and animated films, and grouped together alongside tiles, cups, vases, plates and teapots. A combination of crockery and decorative objects, Suarez Frimkess’ ceramics are imbued with a pervasive melancholy, like stepping into an antique shop on a forgotten street and encountering castoffs from another time and place. With the past still twinkling in her peripheral vision, Suarez Frimkess is a nonagenarian who … still sustains an artistic practice, living each day as a version of now.”