Artist Talks: Peter Shire

Join us at Art/Space 114 for the next installment of our Artist Talks series, featuring artist Peter Shire in conversation with art critic and Art/Space 114’s Writer-in-Residence, Shana Nys Dambrot.

The event will begin at 7:00 PM.

Free and open to the public. Limited entry! RSVP to claim your spot.

Donations are welcome and deeply appreciated: Art/Space 114 is an artist-first, 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Your support helps sustain artist-led programming at Art/Space 114 and ensures we can continue offering free public events, thought-provoking exhibitions, and community-centered gatherings. Every contribution directly supports our mission to foster an inclusive space by and for artists in Downtown LA.

About the exhibition, in the words of Shana Nys Dambrot:

Art/Space 114 is pleased to present The Answer Is Yes, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist and designer Peter Shire. Spanning furniture, ceramics, drawing, painting, and large-scale constructions, the exhibition brings together works that dissolve the boundaries between fine art, craft, and design. Long associated with the Memphis Group’s postmodern legacy, Shire’s practice is rooted in an ongoing, experimental dialogue between color, structure, and use—one that treats objects as active participants in space rather than neutral utilities.

Peter Shire builds his chromatopic, pattern-prone worlds from the inside out, starting with the kinetic, pictorial instinct of a painter and forming it into the engineering physics of steel and the volatile, kiln-fired alchemy of ceramic and its glazes.

His furniture and large-scale constructions behave like inhabitable paintings—armatures of bent steel, laminate planes, lacquered arcs, and buoyant cylinders assembled into chairs, tables, and towers that feel like tiny stage sets. Seats perch on improbable legs; tabletops cantilever into space; arches, wedges, and spheres collide in structures that borrow equally from freeway signage, children’s blocks, and the Memphis Group’s iconic postmodern vernacular.

These works declare themselves as usable objects while refusing the neutrality of utility, insisting instead on posture, attitude, and color as structural forces. Shire’s pursuit relies on the rhythmic, obsessive application of skill and the fickle font of talent to conjure that which he has not yet seen. “My analogy is that there’s something around the corner that I can’t see, but I know it’s there,” he says, “and I’m constantly trying to get around that corner and see it.”

This exhibition conjures a site-responsive orchestration of metal and clay that is very much a classic Shire show—work in design, painting, and especially the in-betweens, across all points of scale, refinement, gesture, and invention. Dismantling traditional distinctions between vessel and space, the exhibition proposes that a teapot and a tower share the same DNA. With Shire, the idiosyncratic boundaries between fine art, craft, and design are not simply blurred but rendered irrelevant.

The paintings operate as twin laboratories for this system. On paper and canvas, stacked geometries, zigzagging ladders, and buoyant pylons rise against pastel skies or watery grounds, behaving like diagrams for impossible cities or stage directions for future objects. In clay, these motifs condense into bodies—striped torsos, tilted spouts, stacked discs, and bulbous feet. Each pot becomes a figure; each figure becomes a container. Glaze becomes weather, pattern becomes anatomy, and color is never decorative but structural.

Ultimately, the viewer is engulfed by a situational plethora—a visual system functioning as a word cloud of contemporary ceramics, where the vessel acts as both body and container: strong enough to endure the kiln, fragile enough to be destroyed. This enchanted gathering exists as both litany and literature, a “happy place” of high-voltage reality. As Shire observes of this particular, prolific moment, “Right now it’s like this. Sometimes it’s just like this.”

For inquiries and private viewing appointments, contact .

Art/Space 114 is located at 114 W 4th St, Los Angeles, CA.
The Answer Is Yes is on view Wednesday through Friday, 2 PM — 8 PM, and Saturdays and Sundays, 12 PM — 6 PM, through April 4.

— Shana Nys Dambrot, 2026

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