Rick Hintze: Born of the Soil at Guild Gallery, New York City

As its second exhibition, this new gallery brought in Wisconsin potter Rick Hintze for a show consisting entirely of sizeable stoneware vessels, each cryptically dated 2010-2021. Hintze has been making functional pottery since the 1970s, and while he is not confined to a signature style, all his work over the years – functional, vessels or sculpture – has had a consistent character of modesty yet persuasiveness. The works on view here have not abandoned that low-key harmony in favor of exaggerated form, vivid colour, savage surface or sociopolitical content, the usual routes to ceramic celebrity today. Instead, they made me think of the late Warren MacKenzie’s description of his own work as being the product of the quiet midwestern landscape. Hintze shares that recessive assurance.