Greenville, S.C., ceramic artists Russell Biles has joined if ART Gallery. Biles creates satirical cast-porcelain sculptures with a political, cultural and social bite. He is among South Carolina's nationally most prominent contemporary artists. Biles will be in the Columbia Museum of Art exhibition SC6: South Carolina Innovators In Clay, which opens in June. He has been represented by major league contemporary-ceramics galleries such as Garth Clark Gallery in New York and Massachusets' Ferrin Gallery. Biles consistently shows in museums, art centers and galleries across the country, and his work has been in several S.C. Triennial exhibitions. His sculptures are in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Museum of Art and Design in New York City. At if ART, Biles is showing small, totem-like porcelain sculptures from his So Fresh series. The sculptures are assembled from shards of Biles' Wee Art Club series, which consists of three-inch sculptures of different prominent figures. Included in the Wee Art Club series are Barak Obama, George W. Bush, the Frankenstein monster, Kim Il Sung, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo's David and others. The So Fresh sculptures combine parts of these and other figures in vertical structures five to 11 inches tall.
All images of the So Fresh series, 2010, cast porcelain, 5 to 11 inches in height, $200 – $300.
