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Marc Zimmerman

Live and Let Live Ceramic totem
Regular price $5,200
Regular price Sale price $5,200
Sale Sold

Marc Zimmerman

Regular price $5,200
Regular price Sale price $5,200
Sale Sold
Ceramic
56'' high

Ceramic

56'' high

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About

The Piece

Start at the bottom and work your way up. Faces, fish, and creatures you cannot quite name rise together through deep greens, burgundy, and warm earth, each one hand-built and covered in marks that Zimmerman drew directly into the clay. By the time you reach the fish spreading wide near the crown, you have travelled through an entire world.

Each element was built separately, glazed on its own terms, and stacked in a process Zimmerman describes as intuitive, each form responding to the one below it. Nothing was planned from the top down. It grew. Zimmerman has been building worlds like this since his Venice Beach pottery days in the 1960s, and that history is quietly present in every mark.

Works equally well indoors as a room anchor or outside in a garden where the textured surfaces catch and hold natural light through the day.

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About

The Artist

The Artist
About

The Artist

Marc Zimmerman is an American painter and ceramic sculptor based in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, recognized for exuberant, color-driven works that fuse tropical imagery, figurative elements, and stylized botanical forms. Across both canvas and clay, his practice is defined by a playful visual language and a confident orchestration of color that feels at once joyful, intuitive, and structurally resolved.

Zimmerman’s distinctive vocabulary was shaped early through his work in woodcut printmaking, which instilled the crisp edges and compositional clarity that continue to anchor his paintings today. His lush, immersive environments draw inspiration from the dreamlike worlds of Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin, while extended periods living and painting in Kauai, Hawaii, as well as time in Mexico and Europe, infused his work with the saturated light and rhythmic vitality that define his celebrated Jungle and Tropical Fantasy Floral series.

In recent years, Zimmerman has returned to his earliest artistic passion, clay, expanding his practice into the sculptural realm with his Garden Totems. These vertically stacked ceramic works are hand-built and individually glazed, each element supporting the next in a spontaneous, intuitive process. Rooted in his pottery background from Venice Beach in the 1960s and 70s, the totems translate his painterly sensibility into three dimensions, bringing the same sense of movement, humor, and joie de vivre into the garden or interior space.

A lifelong artist with more than four decades of studio practice, Zimmerman has been an active presence on the Monterey Peninsula since the 1990s. His work is represented by galleries in California, Florida, and New York, and is held in private collections throughout the United States and internationally.

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