Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The sculptor and furniture designer Peter Shire arguably warrants an institutional retrospective at the Design Museum or V&A. A founding member of the Memphis Group of postmodernists in 1980s Italy, the Los Angeles native brought stripes and brightly coloured, playful geometry into the vernacular of contemporary ceramics. His last major show of new work — Rumpus Room — was at Jeffrey Deitch in Hollywood, in 2023, and included a new version of his giddy-looking Bel Air Chair in speckle-sprayed pink with lime, blue and orange accents; an assortment of ceramics; and a 1956 red customised Ford pick-up truck, which Shire drove into the gallery for the launch. But one of the most significant shows Shire is involved with this year is the smallest of his career. Yes! is a group show that opens next month at M Goldstein, a micro-sized 136 sq ft gallery in London’s Shoreditch. It’s significant because it spotlights a single teapot by Shire, an object at the heart of his work. “I love that something as prosaic as a teapot, and the cups that Shire makes as part of his Echo Park Pottery brand, can bring such joy,” explains curator Pippa Brooks.“The idea for Yes! came about when I was at the recent Judy Chicago exhibition at the Serpentine gallery,” says Brooks. “It moved me to tears, but it was also exciting — depicting the beauty in Chicago’s ongoing struggle as a female artist. It was about being affirmative and fearless. I realised I wanted to base the show around something of Peter’s, because his work, for me, is all about optimism, and taking something ordinary and making it magic; exploring the sculptural possibilities of something utilitarian. The world is so bleak right now. I want to offer something joyful and inspiring.”Shire’s ceramics inhabit two worlds in the same universe. There are his fine art one-offs and editions, and the approximately 6,000 mugs, vases and candle holders his studio produces each year under the Echo Park Pottery label. All are hand built. The mugs, with their distinctive elongated handles and spattered glaze, are available to buy for £95 from stores including Third Drawer Down online. The teapots are scarcer and, on the second-hand market, can cost from around £900 to close to £10,000 for a 1982 piece from dealers on 1st Dibs. Crucially, everything is fit for purpose, not purely art. “Each teapot I make is fully glazed inside,” Shire tells me from his studio in California. “If you can afford to pour tea out of one every day, go ahead. Every form we’ve done is functional, no matter how extraordinary looking.” Indeed, using the pieces is to “engage with the fantasy of it all”.For Shire, the culture of tea is nuanced, inextricably bound up in “socio-economics and world economics,” he says. He’s especially interested in how “drinking tea is aligned with the middle classes”. He cites George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which the ritual of tea is used as a litmus test for whether you are able to ascend in society. In this context, a teapot as art has a particularly provocative playfulness. If you can afford to pour tea out of one every day, go ahead. Every form we’ve done is functional, no matter how extraordinary looking“One of the big conversations in recent years has been about what it means to be middle class now. They used to say that the key to being middle class was owning your own home, but class is now about an emotional as well as economic state. My niece told me recently that I’m not middle class because the internet says I’m worth $3mn, but where I am based, in Echo Park, a shack costs $1mn. And it’s a traditionally working-class neighbourhood. I was born here.”Shire is fascinated with the Merchant Ivory fantasy of an elaborate English afternoon tea, as well as the idea of keeping household objects “for best”, meaning never using them. But he believes absolutely everything in a home is “simply furniture” and makes his tea ceramics as visually elaborate as possible to make them pleasing to use. But the ceramics are not just upending domestic rituals. “I started using spray guns with paint after making a joke that we could take something as ubiquitous as a mug and make artworks that looked like they were $10mn paintings done by Sam Francis, the abstract expressionist, for 10 bucks. Now that style of spattered paint is part of our DNA.”The teapot at Yes! — made in 2024, and on sale for £1,650 — is pure Shire. It is huge, at 31cm high and 35cm wide, and has a girder-like spout that is half white, half orange, with a set of stripes on the main vessel that are synonymous with the designer — right down to the shirts he always wears — and a red orb on a blue disc that serves as a lid. It looks like a toy. It’s a simple, profoundly happy thing. Brooks is thrilled to have it on show alongside other work she thinks channel optimism, including pieces by Matthew Stone, Zoe Bedeaux, John Maybury and Louise Gray. “I love that [teapots] represent ritual and comfort but also camp. And Peter’s teapots are familiar and outrageous at once. They delight. There’s a dire lack of the delightful in the world right now.”“Yes!”, at M Goldstein, 67 Hackney Road, London E2 8ET; February 6-27, Thursday to SundayFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
