Like the confectioners that craft Japanese wagashi, traditional tea-ceremony treats, the artist Ron Nagle, 80, creates miniature, meticulously rendered objects that are ripe with dual meaning. In his otherworldly ceramic sculptures, which are small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, pastel stucco planes converge with glossy half-moon shapes, suggesting animal tails, chewed-up wads of gum, bare tree limbs, erect genitalia or excrement — sometimes all at once.

Next month, some 30 of Nagle’s provocative sculptures and drawings will go on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in the exhibition “Getting to No,” a significant showcase of his recent work. While Nagle is an established artist — in 2013, his sculptures were featured in the 55th Venice Biennale, and he has works in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and though he played an important role in forming the California Clay Movement, which helped elevate the status of ceramic art, he is still something of a cult figure within a few relatively contained communities. Outside of the visual art world, though, he is also known as a prolific songwriter and composer; he’s credited for writing iconic songs on albums by Jefferson Airplane, Sammy Hagar and Barbra Streisand, as well as for creating many of the sound effects in “The Exorcist.”

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