Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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 \u2014\u00a0Rumpus Room \u2014 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.\u00a0But 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\u2019s Shoreditch. It\u2019s significant because it spotlights a single teapot by Shire, an object at the heart of his work. \u201cI 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,\u201d explains curator Pippa Brooks.\u201cThe idea for Yes! came about when I was at the recent Judy Chicago exhibition at the Serpentine gallery,\u201d says Brooks. \u201cIt moved me to tears, but it was also exciting \u2014 depicting the beauty in Chicago\u2019s 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\u2019s, 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.\u201dShire\u2019s 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 \u00a395 from stores including Third Drawer Down online. The teapots are scarcer and, on the second-hand market, can cost from around \u00a3900 to close to \u00a310,000 for a 1982 piece from dealers on 1st Dibs. Crucially, everything is fit for purpose, not purely art. \u201cEach teapot I make is fully glazed inside,\u201d Shire tells me from his studio in California. \u201cIf you can afford to pour tea out of one every day, go ahead. Every form we\u2019ve done is functional, no matter how extraordinary looking.\u201d Indeed, using the pieces is to \u201cengage with the fantasy of it all\u201d.For Shire, the culture of tea is nuanced, inextricably bound up in \u201csocio-economics and world economics,\u201d he says. He\u2019s especially interested in how \u201cdrinking tea is aligned with the middle classes\u201d. He cites George Bernard Shaw\u2019s 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\u2019ve done is functional, no matter how extraordinary looking\u201cOne of the big conversations in recent years has been about what it means to be middle class now.\u00a0They 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\u2019m not middle class because the internet says I\u2019m worth $3mn, but where I am based, in Echo Park, a shack costs $1mn. And it\u2019s a traditionally working-class neighbourhood. I was born here.\u201dShire is fascinated with the Merchant Ivory fantasy of an elaborate English afternoon tea, as well as the idea of keeping household objects \u201cfor best\u201d, meaning never using them. But he believes absolutely everything in a home is \u201csimply furniture\u201d and makes his tea ceramics as visually elaborate as possible to make them pleasing to use.\u00a0But the ceramics are not just upending domestic rituals. \u201cI 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.\u201dThe teapot at Yes! \u2014\u00a0made in 2024, and on sale for \u00a31,650 \u2014 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 \u2014\u00a0right down to the shirts he always wears \u2014\u00a0and a red orb on a blue disc that serves as a lid. It looks like a toy. It\u2019s a simple, profoundly happy thing.\u00a0Brooks 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. \u201cI love that [teapots] represent ritual and comfort but also camp. And Peter\u2019s teapots are familiar and outrageous at once. They delight. There\u2019s a dire lack of the delightful in the world right now.\u201d\u201cYes!\u201d, at M Goldstein, 67 Hackney Road, London E2 8ET; February 6-27, Thursday to SundayFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":161336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-161335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161335"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161337,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161335\/revisions\/161337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}