In a Peanuts strip from 1952, Charlie Brown stands before a rack of comic books with titles like GOUGE and STAB!, ready to revel in gore. In 1987 the artist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess appropriated this darkly funny scene for a wall ceramic created with her late husband, Michael Frimkess. The grid of four tiles features an illustration of a fanciful townhouse, along with drawings inspired by the comic book Archie’sMadhouse and antic cells from Donald Duck and The Katzenjammer Kids. In the top left corner stands Charlie Brown, arms extended, exclaiming, “What a beautiful gory layout!”

The panel, which hints at the chaos lurking behind pleasant domestic façades, is currently on view in a small, potent exhibition of the ninety-six-year-old artist’s work at David Zwirner in Los Angeles. Organized by the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, it includes more than three dozen drawings and ceramic pieces dating back to 1970. Elegantly arranged on a long white plinth are Suarez Frimkess’s hand-formed cups, plates, teapots, and figurines, all proudly wearing their imperfections, as well as works she created with her husband. For roughly half a century he molded clay into vessels resembling Greek amphorae and Qing dynasty vases, and she emblazoned them with autobiographical family scenes and comic book characters.

Suarez Frimkess was born in Maturín, Venezuela, in 1929. The tribulations of her novelesque life began when at age seven she was sent to live in an orphanage after her mother’s death. A teacher there nurtured her affinity for art, and as a teenager she went to study part-time at a prestigious art school in Caracas, until a lack of financial support made further studies impossible. At eighteen she became pregnant by a married man she followed to Santiago, Chile, with whom she later had a second child. She resumed her art studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, deciding to pursue sculpture thanks to courses with Norman Carlberg and Paul Harris, sculptors visiting from the US. She quickly achieved acclaim for clay and plaster works that abstracted the female body.

Her success was not well received by her partner, who told her that if she wanted to pursue artistic opportunities abroad, she shouldn’t bother returning. She left anyway, making the harrowing decision to part with her children in 1963. During a residency that year at the Clay Art Center in Westchester, New York, she met Michael. They eventually married and moved to Los Angeles, where their daughter was born. When Michael was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1971, Magdalena put her own work aside and began decorating the vessels that he was no longer able to paint.

The duo made for a study in contrasts. Michael was devoted to fabricating flawless vases that harked back to ancient forms; Magdalena covered them in humorous, expressionist drawings and loosely applied colors. An untitled piece from 1984 takes the form of a late Qing dynasty vase, but it is decorated with a samurai and a Hopi dancer. She borrowed from the world around her to arrive at her designs: Indigenous patterns, corporate logos, the paintings of El Greco. But her most enduring motifs have been comic book characters: Minnie Mouse, Olive Oyl, and Condorito, a charming anthropomorphic condor that appears in a popular Chilean comic. Little Orphan Annie, whom she thought of as an alter ego, makes an appearance on a 1990 ceramic box. In one panel Annie tells her dog, “There’s lots worse things ’n being an orphan, eh Sandy?”

Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and John Wesley appropriated comics as a way of examining mass culture. But Suarez Frimkess presents them earnestly, without distance or irony. Comic book characters survive insurmountable odds and bounce back from the most desperate circumstances—mythical stories that resonate with her own life. As she told me in 2024, “They are the best philosophers for me, they know everything.” Condorito, a character who is relegated to the margins of society yet always finds ways to persevere, appears frequently in her work.

The artist’s late-in-life ascent—which included her first solo museum exhibition, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024—has marked a felicitous turn in her story. At Zwirner a ceramic box serves as a pedestal for a small figurine of Little Lulu, a character I can’t help but think of as another stand-in for the artist. She wields a paintbrush, and below her appears the phrase “How nice.”