It’s not only younger artists adding cartoon and pop-inspired decoration to their ceramics. At 95, magdalena suarez frimkess has been doing exactly that for more than six decades. Her figurines and hand-built vessels featuring the likes of Olive Oyl, Donald Duck and Condori—a comic-book character from Chile, where the Venezuela-born artist moved in 1949—are completely idiosyncratic and autobiographical. They are even diaristic in the sense that Suarez Frimkess wakes up and goes to work in her Venice studio every day, making exactly what she feels like: “I just use whatever happens that day,” she told T Magazine in 2014. “It’s like a menu that you choose your food from.”

read the article: why, at 95, magdalena suarez-frimkess matters for a new generation of women ceramicists

Magdalena Suarez Frimkess at her home studio in Venice, California, December 2023
Photo by: Peyton Fulford