Zimra Beiner

In Zimra Beiner’s first exhibition with Hostler Burrows, If It Holds It Grows (2023), heavily-glazed ceramic sculptures appear knotted, elaborate, and almost molten in their playful rough-hewn forms. The latticework arabesques in stoneware clay—often utilizing cut-outs to reveal a secondary, internal wall— are modeled on the form of household plant stands. These ordinary, domestic structures which elsewhere are used for gardening and to wick away water become the core model for Beiner’s elaborations of design, care, and the artifice of nature. By emphasizing the stand over its counterpart, Beiner inverts the classical genre of still life to emphasize the supporting characters underpinning the scene. His sculptures exhibited at the gallery’s Los Angeles location transform this simple, repeated form into visions of organic architecture: knotted root clusters, vines crowding a trellis, or the sandy grit and colorful textural shape of artificial pebbles and other ground cover. A gifted colorist, Beiner’s glazes cascade and eddy in muddy infusions of earth tones, yellows, and soft greens. Through tactile impressions left on their surfaces and in the looseness of their fired forms, many of his ceramic stands recall the clay’s liquid state and the the act of transformation that working with clay entails.

As Beiner states, “I examine the intersection between reality and fiction from the obscure to the generic. I use my own language of line, volume and composition to make sense of the overlaps which occur in the studio (my reality), the home (everyone’s reality) and the gallery (the reality of art).”

Zimra Beiner (b. 1985, Toronto, ON) received a BFA from NSCAD University in 2009 and an MFA from Alfred University in 2012. His work has been exhibited internationally, including exhibitions at The Hole NYC, Present CO, Cross Mackenzie Gallery, the Gardiner Museum, and the Katzen at the American University Museum. Recent awards include the Winnifred Shantz Award, the NCECA Emerging Artist Award, nomination for the RBC Emerging Artist Award in Ceramics, and recent residencies include the Berlin Ceramics Centre, Private Studio Jingdezhen, China, and the Center for Contemporary Ceramics at California State University Long Beach. He is currently Assistant Professor in Ceramics at the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly ACAD) in Calgary, Canada and lives between Calgary and Los Angeles.