Patricia Rieger

Patricia Rieger (born Portland, Maine) is an American ceramic sculptor and painter based in Chicago. She has lived and worked for extended periods in New York, the Netherlands, Spain, Vermont and Chicago, shows her work frequently in the United States and Europe, and has taught as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in a department of ceramics since 1999.

For more than three decades Rieger has developed a poetic voice through sculptural ceramic work. The work is a search for meaning and purpose, employing a narrative style that remains open and inviting and resists straightforward interpretation. Silence holds her figures in frozen moments of waiting for action to begin, giving at once a sense of strength and vulnerability. The imagery, often quiet and static, the heroic of the ordinary, is at times drawn from art-historical sources and at times grows intuitively from her imagination; she asks who we are and where we have been.

Her practice draws on human experience, the collective unconscious and mythology with the goal of making them factual, physical and sculptural, and it reinvents the use of the figure and the abstract in contemporary ceramic art so that viewers arrive at their own meanings. The work is executed either in a subtle, muted palette or with exuberant colorations. In the series Found. Conversations with a Bird she invents a character that stands for others, aware that the search echoes precedents such as Velázquez and Juan Muñoz; The Expulsion Series: He & She transforms the two figures of Masaccio's fifteenth-century fresco as a response to the present historical moment; the Cold Song works, titled after Henry Purcell's semi-opera King Arthur, use an almost black-and-white palette to stress the fiction and timelessness of the scene; and the Leopard series, with its profusion of limbs referencing Tibetan and Indian sculpture, answers her quieter work with an explosion of gesture and color.

In 1987 Rieger received the Southern Arts Federation Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2014 and 2015 she had a major solo exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, and she has shown at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, with solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery and Artifact Gallery in New York, Galeria Sargadelos in Madrid, Santiago, Vigo and Lugo, Casa das Artes in Vigo and Sky Earth Gallery in Macau. Her work has been recognized in ceramic and fine art forums nationally and internationally, included in books and reviewed in magazines, and written about by Lisa Wainwright of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and by the late curator and writer Jane Kessler.