Melvino Garretti

Space Versus Space presents objects past and present by Los Angeles sculptor, painter, and ceramicist Melvino Garretti.

Melvino Garretti began to make ceramics in 1965 as a student in the Studio Watts Workshop and became a specialist of East Asian stoneware following an apprenticeship at Richard Bennett’s legendary Great Barrington Pottery. He was a vital figure in San Francisco’s experimental arts community of the late 1960s and early 1970s, working closely with Anna Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop and participating in events and performances at Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art. Garretti is perhaps best known today for his collaborations with Los Angeles potter Michael Frimkess.

Garretti’s artworks are the product of graphic impulse, technical erudition, and conceptual high jinks. His gestural painting, grounded in funk and neo-expressionism, is at once casual and exuberant. His ceramic and fabric sculptures, masquerading as everyday things, delight in trickery—vessels covered in spikes disrupt their own function as repositories; double-side busts shift deviously across visages. Space Versus Space presents these objects in a new installation by Garretti, turning this body of work into an ecstatic and unruly assemblage.