Taller Los Tepalcates
LOT 17
Pair of Perico Lamps #12 and #14, 2025
Glazed low-red Atzompaclay
17.72 x 11.81 in each
Courtesy of the artists and Ago Projects
Suggested retail value: $6,000
Starting bid: $3,000
About the Artwork
Taller Los Tepalcates is a family-run ceramics workshop headed by Asunción and Laura Enríquez Chávez, fifth-generation artisans from Santa María Atzompa, Oaxaca. The sisters’ artistic practice is deeply rooted in Atzompa’s ceramic heritage while pushing its traditional boundaries through a bold, figurative approach to clay. Their studio name is derived from the nahuatl tlapalcatl, meaning a fragment of earthenware, often used to cover kilns during firing. The name itself underscores a long, shared history of resilience and resistance, a process that wastes nothing, that uses what some outside force has broken—be it a simple pot or an entire way of life—to make something ordinary and precious and new. For Laura and Asunción, making is inseparable from being. Their works—anthro- pomorphic vases, playful jugs, surreal animals—merge function with storytelling, humor, and animism; they are not designed to persuade or prove but simply to exist, as extensions of a life so intimately tied to the material and the land. These are works that take a gleeful sledgehammer to the generic walls between the functional and the fantastical, the ancestral and the contemporary. Each piece invites us to see beyond its outer surface, to consider the fundamental poetry of quotidian forms.
HOW TO BID:
Bidding is available from May 18-June 5.
1) Text 'READY TO BID' or call 628-237-8195.
OR
2) Visit Headlands' Auction Exhibition to see the artwork and bid via pen & paper.
