Marta Los Angeles
February 14 – April 04 2026
The Imago of Isabel Rower, Essay by Jenelle Porter:
An imago is a fully realized insect, a final draft iterated from previous chrysalis sketches. In psychoanalysis, the word describes the subjective creation of an image of a person, one that encompasses feeling and visual representation. Isabel Rower relates imago to her process of making, of becoming, and a desire to create object-images that are “haunted by their references.” Her sculptures function as both chrysalis and imago: transformation and idealization are simultaneous. In Rower’s exhibition of new works, her first major solo, hybrid objects (Is this sculpture or furniture? Yes.) allude to the pasts that infuse them and imagine how history loops and flows through objects.
Rower’s sculptures assume the forms of chairs and tables, teapots and vases. “Furniture is a framework that gives me proportions to work within” she explains. She studied furniture design at university, and the design history of objects remains foundational. Rower’s chosen framework produces friction, a brushing up against constraints that often leads her through formal investigation and critical thinking. Constraints are both generative and restrictive, and tools with which to navigate the ambiguous hierarchies of art, design, and craft. She does so via elegantly calibrated alignments of shape and surface, mass and detail. And where her work astonishes is at its surfaces. Rower delights in surfaces that make things look like other things: clay painted asmarble or veneered with “marbled” tiles; papier-mâché that mimics japanned furniture. Rower’s attraction to trompe l’oeil asks us to think through the why and hows of emulating, for instance, the eighteenth and nineteenth European furniture that emulated earlier Japanese styles. Economics, politics, trade, colonialism, and social trends are conveyed through mimicry loops that ripple along the surfaces of her works. The curious will dive in.
Rower uses surface treatments to adorn, to maximize. Clay objects are painted as faux stone or veneered with pigmented clay. If I were to describe the latter without a visual aid, I would call it marbled, or maybe sliced sausage. Rower rolls combined pigmented clay and slices it into small slabs that she then paves on to the surface, a process akin to mosaic—and the impression issimilarly eye dazzling. Cathedra, Triclinares I, Sella, Ecdysis, and Carapace are chair shaped and surfaced in nature colors like green and blue and brown, earthy and alluring like minerals. In contrast to her more dynamic surfaces, Shrine is carved out of a solid mass of 1000 pounds offired stoneware and glazed in monochromatic bronze. Its stacked triangular convexities evokethe Art Deco “Egyptomania,” inspired by the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. Let’s call it subtle maximalism.
Rower considers words a material to use, and we can follow her titles like trail markers in a reference forest. Cathedra is a bishop’s chair, derived from the Greek word for seat. Cathedra was inspired by a chair by Kawai Kanjiro. Rower translates his carved wood original through clay, a quiet homage to Kawai’s significant role in studio pottery and mingei. Ecdysis and carapace are insect terms. Petiole, Calyx, Regma, and Sepal from botany. Sophrosyne is anancient Greek concept of an ideal of excellence of character and soundness of mind (goals!). Titles like Imaginary Register, Fetish Percolater, and Faience Farce amplify the faux-ness offive-sided boxes painted to mimic stone. The curlicue arms that adorn Loosener of Limbs, Love are exuberant adhesions to a blocky settee. Its Japanese indigo fabric cushion is juxtaposed with a French-inspired floral inlaid on the backrest. Games That the Pink-Ankled Graces Play and One-Lunged Woodlot borrow from poetry, respectively.
Rower’s exhibition is arranged as a squared-U arrangement of sculptures, the open side oriented to the gallery entrance. It is a welcome. This mise en scène mimics the dining room, ortriclinium, at the ancient Villa of Livia, the walls of which featured frescoes of a lush, idealized garden and a ceiling painted sky blue. Rower evokes Livia’s triclinium with dusky paintings offlora on vintage linen sheets, table cloths, and towels, installed on the three walls of the gallery. Other references and touchstones include Galleria Borghese’s faux stone fantasia; eighteenth-century japanned, papier-mâché furniture; embroidered ribbon; and poetry. It’s a fool’s errand to distill an artist’s works to a handful of known references, so consider these items a place to start. Rower also looks to artists, designers, and craftspeople who use utilitarian materials within self-imposed limits: Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Max Lamb, Valentine Schlegel, and Diane Simpson. For her, their work shows some ways material limitations are exceeded through process, technique, and conceptual rigor.
Rower’s work shows that surface is not mere veneer. Surface is a location of transmission, a kind of portal. She makes objects that offer passage from surface affect to interior realms of ideas and histories. Look at the ways her vases and teapots wrangle various design references under the umbrella of her mosaiced veneer. Or how Pierian Spring, Oleander, and Loosener of Limbs, Love are inlaid with floral designs that imitate mother-of-pearl. Rower’s artistry and technique is exceptional. Her objects invite a consideration of the differences between art and design. Art is not to be touched, but we can touch Rower’s. What is the effect of trompe l’oeil when you can run your hand along the surface of a wall and understand that it’s not genuine marble but painted? That a chair’s surface is not undulating but solid? That a settee is not wood but papier-mâché? That hollow and solid are not givens? It is not the eye that is tricked, but the body. This is not a mischievousness. This is productive tension. Is it sculpture or furniture? Yes.
Quotes by the artist are from conversations with the author on February 1 and 9, 2026.
Shrine, 2025. Stoneware, Glaze. 29.25 H × 18.0 W × 24.0 D in.
Shrine, 2025. Stoneware, Glaze. 29.25 H × 18.0 W × 24.0 D in.
Triclinares I, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 37.0 H × 25.0 W × 20.0 D in.
Triclinares I (Detail), 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 37.0 H × 25.0 W × 20.0 D in.
Triclinares II, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 37.0 H × 25.0 W × 20.0 D in.
Triclinares II (Detail), 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 37.0 H × 25.0 W × 20.0 D in.
Cathedra, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 24.5 H × 22.0 W × 20.5 D in.
Cathedra, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 24.5 H × 22.0 W × 20.5 D in.
Sella, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 29.5 H × 17.0 W × 18.0 D in.
Sella, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 29.5 H × 17.0 W × 18.0 D in.
Ecdysis, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 34.0 H × 20.5 W × 18.5 D in.
Ecdysis (Detail), 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 34.0 H × 20.5 W × 18.5 D in.
Carapace, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 31.75 H × 15.0 W × 13.5 D in.
Carapace, 2025. Stoneware, Mason Stain, Clear Glaze. 31.75 H × 15.0 W × 13.5 D in.
Sophrosyne, 2025. High Fire Stoneware, Clear Glaze. 6.0 H × 18.0 W × 18.0 D in.
Sophrosyne, 2025. High Fire Stoneware, Clear Glaze. 6.0 H × 18.0 W × 18.0 D in.
Sophrosyne (Detail), 2025. High Fire Stoneware, Clear Glaze. 6.0 H × 18.0 W × 18.0 D in.