It feels like a major oversight that this is the first museum survey of the Venezuelan-born, L.A.-based artist’s prolific career. Magdalena Suarez Frimkess is an integral part of the tradition of California ceramics, but often, she has become more of the artist's artist than celebrated on an institutional level. Along with works made collaboratively with her husband, Michael Frimkess, who share a home studio in Venice, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess: The Finest Disregard at LACMA feels like both an introduction and reintroduction of the artist's influential career. At the age of 95, it was long overdue.
Suarez Frimkess has taken pop-culture and played with it, bent it, carved into it, elongated and reshaped it. In a true Outsider Art fashion, it is both naive and playful. But it also demonstrates the visual endurance and steadfastness of the icons she works with. No matter how much she manipulates them, these characters, whether Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck or Popeye, remain somehow visually intact. It's a powerful reminder, and a beautiful exploration in changing the expectations of a medium while keeping within its traditions. —Evan Pricco
