Drawing with Pottery: In The Studio with Elisabeth Kley

Figuring importantly in her work is the French playwright, fantasist, and Dadaist Alfred Jarry—author of the absurdist play Ubu Roi and propounder of ’Pataphysics, “belief in the science of imaginary solutions,” as defined by Kley in the catalogue for the Minutes of Sand. In that exhibition, we expected to become entangled in the sensual gyrations of characters from Tales of the Thousand and One Nights. We could detect nature and geometry collaborating in the architecture of Kley’s elaborate compositions, which enmesh us in their subtle mixing of structural support and gestural flamboyance, in flower-strewn patios where we expect to see dancers.

In the catalogue, Kley points to an underlying current running through her many projects. Speaking of her drawings, she says, “I’m aiming for a feeling that the marks are a kind of fluid net that floats across the surface or support.” The zig-zags in her drawings refer to the “Egyptian way of rendering water,” taking us alongside a “meandering river.”

Also inspired by Jarry’s shenanigans and gestural ramblings is the South African story-telling, mind-expanding, animator-draftsman William Kentridge, who leads the line through its many potential perambulations. As Kentridge does in his compelling, somehow very moving series of drawings “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,” Kley respectfully acknowledges the quotidian. 

Through her interaction with humble, useful household objects, such as clay pots and tile walls, she suggests a dialogue between the ordinary and the higher reaches of art and the mind. Of course, one is aware of the absurdity of such observations, but we are also at liberty to also create our own dramatic settings for them in Kley’s theatrical world. The rooms and the stage designs and the costumed objects are prepared for our imagination of personal and contemporary scenarios.

We are aware of time and rhythm, the art of story telling as lines swirl and guide us through space. Ultimately, who needs nature when you can have a garden inside a courtyard imagined by Elisabeth Kley in a gallery like the Drawing Room off bustling Main Street in East Hampton or a New York studio amid the gruff stretches of Grattan Street in Bushwick?

Matisse and Picasso are prevailing undercurrents in the work, which harbors unending relationships among artists, designers, musicians, and writers. Other participants in this transhistorical dialogue include the English illustrators John Flaxman and Aubrey Beardsley, stage sets for the Ballets Russes, and the pottery and drawings of Jean Cocteau.

Hanging on her studio wall are paintings by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, a multifaceted artist-designer with whom she feels attuned. We can hear the strains of Erik Satie and Claude Debussy as Kley takes us through the reaches of art history and surrealistic dreams and perhaps, stretched out on the therapist’s couch, we can connect with Kley’s contemporaries, like painters Marina Adams and Katherine Bradford, who show with Kley at CANADA, a gallery in Tribeca.

We can easily imagine dancing figures aligning themselves with Kley’s elegant lines. The patterns speak or sing to us, invoking the fluidity of dreams and bearing titles like Incomplete Metamorphosis and, most charmingly, Cleopatra Side Pattern. The artist dresses her terra-cotta sculptures in paper, costuming them to perform in our imagination where the figures are like forms in wallpaper.

Kley remarkably creates a sense of calm together with, to quote Bob Dylan, a head full of ideas that should be driving her insane. This is modernism today.

*This article originally appeared in Art & Object Magazine's Winter 2026 issue.