Lidya Buzio's work has been coveted and acquired for nearly 40 years by discerning collectors, curators, and people appreciative of her unique realizations in clay, wood, and on canvas and paper. Dark Blue Roofscape, 1986, Earthenware, 13 3/4" H.   Teapot 1983, Ceramic 5" H.   1983 invitation, Thomas Segal Gallery, Boston Her early years in Montevideo were influenced by her close association with the Torres-García family and the artists of the Taller Torres-García, among whom were her teachers: José Montes, Guillermo Fernández, Horacio Torres and José Collell. Buzio developed technically and artistically through her work with the ceramicist Collell, creating her clay sculpture from earthenware slabs and forming their shapes with the use of curved patterns. Roofscape 1986, 15 x 11 1/2"   XIX/1985, Earthenware 14 x 12"   Roofscape vessel 1988, 13 x 13" Drawing and then painting directly on the unfired clay, Buzio left behind the bucolic landscapes and still lives that had informed her previous work when she settled in New York in 1971. Reflecting her new surroundings, her vessels depicted the buildings and skyline of lower Manhattan and their form also changed as the geometry of the landscape had. Earthenware ca.1987 13½ x 13 1/2"   New York Buildings 1996 Tempera/museum board 22 x 22"   2003 Watercolor & ink on paper, 5 3/4 x 8" Ed Lebow wrote of the spatial issues in her work, commenting: "Buzio splices illusory space with real. She has a keen eye for the fundamental difference between working on flat and on three-dimensional ground. Unlike a flat surface, a volumetric one is not static. It moves through space, lending the image it carries the full effects of the hollows and swells. Since there are no true straight or flat lines Buzio cheats the eye by gently tilting the edges of buildings to give them a plumb appearance or by toying with angles and curves to accentuate the volumes that the walls and lines seem to hold and describe..." Earthenware XIII/1993, 10 x 17"   Two views: X/2003 11 1/4" H.   Teapot 1990, 8 x 10" "...as .. this double vision is fused into an undivided awareness of three-dimensional space, the closely related differences between the surface and form of Buzio's pots are merged. And we experience a cogent space that comes and goes in a duple rhythm of expansion and containment, a rhythm that manifests sparkling exchanges between memory and recognition and the massive shifts from waking to dreaming."1 3-part buildings 2004, Earthenware, 14 x 24" variable   4-part buildings, V/2003, Earthenware, 13 1/2 x 21" variable As Garth Clark, author, curator, and gallery owner, wrote, "Using the dry, transparent manner of fresco, Lidya Buzio paints the sensual, burnished surfaces of her tensely curving pots with a beehive of 'inner' architectural volumes. Her literal subject matter is the SoHo roofscape, but her real interest is in creating the effect of plunging deep into the pictorial interior of the vessel by painting architectural perspectives on curved surfaces."2 Three views: XX/2002, Earthenware, 7 x 12" diameter XI/2003 Earthenware, 12"H   Teapot XIV/2003, 8"H   VII/2003, 9 1/4 x 8 1/4" 4-part buildings, IX/2005, 14 1/4 x 26" variable   7-part buildings, XXII/2003, Earthenware, 14 x 33" variable Philip Rawson, the distinguished writer on esthetic theory in ceramics, sees this as the consequence of a masterful use of what he terms 'potter's space.'... "One of the most splendid uses of potter's space seems to me to be in Lidya Buzio's pots. The tension between the curved surfaces which subtend that independent potter's volume and the superficially banal perspectives of the cityscapes that she paints onto them seems to be what generates their extraordinary enigmatic atmosphere... One volume-content flows into another to make a beautifully modulated content of space: something carvers or makers can never achieve, only potters."3 Golden Buildings, 2000 Wood assemblage 20 1/4 x 30 1/2 x 8"   Still Life Construction, 1996 Wood assemblage 30 x 38 x 3 1/2"   Gold Building, 1996 Wood assemblage 15 3/8 x 34 x 6" Sensitive to a legacy of painting, Buzio, who always worked on canvas and with watercolors as well as clay, began in the 1990s to work with wood - creating wall assemblages that were larger than was practical using clay. Boldly three-dimensional yet subtly painted, the 'building' pieces serve as individual icons from her cityscapes. Still Life Perspective, 1997 Wood assemblage 17 x 20 x 3"   Two Vessel Shelf Cityscape, 1998 Wood assemblage 38 x 55 1/2 x 3 1/2"   Cityscape w/Fruit Bowl, 1998 Wood assemblage 33 x 49 x 4 1/4" The wall-hung wood also provided a frame to work within and Buzio made a series of 'through the window' still life/landscapes, also three-dimensional. The window-ledge objects (bowl of fruit, ewer, knife) give the expansive vistas of blue sky or of packed cityscapes an intimacy of familiarity. Citiscape 2002 Oil on wood, 21 x 27 x 4"   Building Assemblage, 2002 Oil on wood, 17 x 20 x 4"   Cityscape 2002, Oil on wood assemblage, 21 x 30 x 2" Cityscape pedestal III, 2003 Painted wood, 40 1/2 x 13 x 13"   Cityscape Side table White 2002, painted wood, 20 1/2 x 20 x 12" Painted Cityscape Side Table, 2002 // acrylic and oil on wood, 20 x 16 x 10"   TTG Fish table 2002, 18 x 24 x 12" Her newest ceramic sculptures capture the architectural elements of the rural villages and land/seascape of the North fork of Long Island, New York. The blues of sea and sky vividly contrast with the blacks, reds and whites of boats and harbors that these new works employ. Rounder, yet sometimes cloven or pierced, they continue to create a duple effect that is unique to Buzio's work. Two views: VII/2006, earthenware, 10 x 9 1/2"   Two views: VIII/2006, earthenware, 10 3/4 x 11" As Robert C. Morgan wrote in his perceptive essay on Buzio in American Ceramics: The effect offered by Buzio, whether in clay or wood, is an illusory one, a magical feast, a post structural ensemble of playful extruded forms. The illusion of these shapes, colors and linear patterns accumulates, after a stealthy period of euphoric contemplation, into something replete with innuendo, obstreperously shifting in scale and proportion. These ironic architectonic deconstructions resemble a psychic phenomenon, the kind that one may feel in those congested screen sets from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Whatever the phenomenon-whether psychic or aesthetic-Buzio has done it. Her glazed and burnished ceramic spectacles are so carefully calculated that the intuition appears hidden until it suddenly bursts forth.4 Two views: XII/2006, earthenware, 9 1/4 x 10"   Two views: XVIII/2006, earthenware, 12 1/4 x 12 1/2" XVII/2006, 11 1/2 x 10 1/2"   XXII/2006, 4 x 6 1/2"   XIX/2006, 12 1/4 x 9 1/2"   XVI/2006, 12 x 11 1/2" Teapot, 1998   Two views: Teapot IX/2006, 6 1/2 x 11" Collage 2005, Watercolor, 10 x 14"   Watercolor & Ink 2004, 9 x 12"   Collage 2005, Watercolor, 10 x 14" Watercolor & Ink 2003   Watercolor & Ink 2003, 7 x 10"   Watercolor & Ink 2003   Watercolor & Ink 2005 ARCO, Madrid 2006   ArteAmericas, Miami 2006   ArtBasel/Miami Beach, 2006 Footnotes: 1 Ed Lebow, Lidya Buzio in Perspective, American Ceramics Magazine, Vol.2 ? 2, 1983 2 Garth Clark, American Ceramics 1876 to the Present, Abbeville Press, 1987, New York 3 Philip Rawson, unpublished address, Kansas City Third International Ceramics Symposium, 1983 4 Robert C. Morgan, Lidya Buzio, American Ceramics, Vol.15 No. 1, 2006 Biography Reviews: American Ceramics, Robert C. Morgan NYTimes Review image NYTimes Magazine image Exhibitions at Cecilia De Torres Ltd.: 2006 Line-Plane-Volume/Sculpture: 1944-2006 2005 Works ON &OF Paper 2000 November: A Latin American Metaphysical Perspective 1996 February: The Still Life 1995 October: 65 Years Of Constructivist Wood: 1930-1995