Joseph Dupré’s subjects are ordinary creatures: dogs, cats, birds, sailboats. His smaller-than-life renderings in either clay or bronze and wax retain a childlike playfulness that comes from devoting as much attention to the surface as to the sculptural form itself. Citing Picasso’s ceramics as well as Matisse and Braque as inspirations, Dupré imbues his subjects with a sweetness that reminds one of youthful creativity and inspiration.

Dupré’s materiality emphasizes a sense of legacy. His use of Delft blue recalls sixteenth-century Dutch pottery and encourages his objects to be viewed in terms of millennia rather than moments. But the precise, careful lines of traditional earthenware appear on Dupré’s animals and objects as wobbly stripes and patches. Variations in shade and application reinvent the static quality of ceramics and provide a fresh perspective on what has often been dismissed as a purely decorative material.

The artist achieves the vibrant finish of his pieces by hand-building and modeling his porcelain creations and painting each work before firing. Born in 1987 and largely self-taught, he has also worked in painting, drawing, and printmaking, but regardless of medium, the artist is primarily concerned with mark making and line. His crude shapes emphasize the hand-pressed nature of a bird’s beak and feathers in Expectantly Blue (2022), while the subject’s indigo hues and crisscross feathers indicate the fragile and painstaking process of both nature and sculpture.

It is impossible to link Dupré’s work to a particular time or place. In keeping his references as shuffled as ancient Greece and yesterday’s trout, he offers us what we have always observed and often overlook at a scale that’s both precious and timeless. He’s careful not to overstate his personal thought process behind each work’s creation: “I want people to interpret it in their own way, through their life and lens.”¹

By rendering humans, objects, and animals alike in this traditional fashion, Dupré’s works become modern relics. They are reminders of the inherently ephemeral nature of life, which must be entombed in another material in order to live on after us.

Note
1. Cici Peng, “A Maker’s Story: Saints, Sexism, Rebels and Relics in the Subversive Ceramics of Pollyanna Johnson and Joseph Dupré,” Inigo, n.d., https://inigo.com/almanac/pollyanna-johnson-joseph-dupre-ceramics.