Stephanie Temma Hier is an artist based in New York whose work merges ceramic sculpture and figurative painting into surreal and unexpected combinations. She starts by shaping various ceramic forms and firing them with glazes before integrating detailed oil paintings into the sculptural surfaces. These pairings emerge through an intuitive process that blends formal training in painting with self-taught ceramic techniques, resulting in compositions where the everyday feels strange and ambiguous.
In her current solo exhibition, Swan Song at Anton Kern Gallery, Hier presents a body of work that reflects on transformation and repetition of motifs. The exhibition’s title references an ancient belief that certain birds express a final expression before death, establishing a backdrop for the unpredictable combinations on view. Objects such as chairs, shoes, flowers, and food appear alongside animals and figures, creating a tableau that oscillates between the domestic and the uncanny.
Across the works, Hier allows motifs to recur, with the swan figure appearing in multiple pieces — from a feathered chair to portrait framing — inviting viewers to navigate familiar items presented in unfamiliar ways. By aligning elements drawn from Dutch still life traditions with fantastical sculptural forms, the works offer a visual world where everyday objects become sites of tension and wonder. Swan Song runs from January 14 to February 21 in New York.
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in Bahia.