The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Brian Rochefort, Rauschenberg sculpture

February 19, 2026·1 hr 11 min·6 clips

Brian Rochefort smashed a sculpture with a hammer, unlocking a new direction for his ceramic art.

The doorway is Made in LA. Green remembers seeing Rochefort's ceramic sculptures at the Hammer, objects that seemed to emerge, grow, burble, and wake up the whitish gallery around them. His admiration is unusually direct. That reaction sets up a short-notice conversation with Rochefort, framed by the remaining weeks of the biennial and by the artist's interest in abstract painting, geology, and more. Rochefort starts with collecting. He links ceramics to the pleasure of making things, gathering rocks and other objects, and arranging them on shelves in a garage. Space becomes practical fast. Two works came to the Hammer and then stayed out because the installation already had enough room and visual weight. The story is dryly funny, and it shows how Rochefort thinks about sculpture as something that needs air around it. Green then turns to surface. After glazes, gradients, glass, and airbrushing, he asks whether adding material to ceramic forms is like the way painters add paint to canvas or linen. Rochefort answers plainly. The process is additive and subtractive: a dominant color, then washes, saturation, complementary choices, and repeated airbrushing. Painting stays in the room as a comparison. The sculptures are not trying to be canvases, but their surfaces come from painterly decisions about color, coverage, and revision, with the kiln making everything a little less obedient. The closing passage changes tone. With Catherine Craft, the conversation lands on whiteness, gallery backdrops, magnifying glass work, and the odd pressure of a phrase about a third-dimensional poem of not more than one word. The ending stays quiet. White is allowed to be material, setting, and poetic condition all at once.

As heard by us

A tactile art conversation where Rochefort's ceramics and Rauschenberg's white spaces reward close looking.

Brian Rochefort gives The Modern Art Notes Podcast a charged, tactile center. Tyler Green starts with the pull of seeing Rochefort's ceramics at the Hammer's Made in LA Biennial: low to the floor, seemingly growing into the white cube, seductive enough to make a viewer lean in…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want ceramics that sit between geology and painting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Modern Art Notes Podcast