When Stephen DeStabler died in May of 2011, the Berkeley-based sculptor was working on one of the biggest shows of his five decade career. Madder and Spirit at the D Young Museum is a retrospective look at the many phases and faces in the life of an innovative artist from the California Clay Movement. Stephen DeStabler's art developed in an era dominated by abstract expression. Even his closest peers derided his fascination with figurative form. He was able to find a middle path, a middle ground in which he balanced the ideas of human figuration and representation with abstraction and found it even more meaningful to negotiate that duality. Another challenge for DeStabler was to create art from a medium that was typically viewed as craft material. Stephen's transforming moment was an accident in the studio. An oversized vertical sculpture began to collapse under its own weight and spread onto the floor. DeStabler saw a new tradition before him. Land-scape sculpture. In wallets with orange scar, you feel this extended human form that takes an X-shape actually under the surface of the earth struggling to emerge, and eventually it does into his work. And it articulates his idea that the earth is like flesh and that the archaeology and geology that are in the earth are like the bones, the structure of the earth. This tidying with his idea of Gaia or Mother Earth that we associate, that's sort of the sense that we are all tied to nature and to the earth. A half dozen Bay Area museums and private collectors loaned massive sculptures to the D-Young Museum for its matter and spirit retrospective. But the most unusual contributions came from Stephen himself. A wall of autobiographical masks and heads from the early decades of his private studies. DeStabler had one of the most beautiful studios that I've ever been in, and when you walked in, your first impression was of these monumental, totemic figures that you see in the exhibition. But if you went into the back corner of the studio, there was a series of shelves with these diminutive little figures ranging from three to eight inches tall, and he told me these are the heart of my studio. These are these little handheld intimate studies that he referred to as his sketchbook. A painter might make drawings in a sketchbook, Stephen DeStabler made miniature sculptures. During the 1970s, DeStabler was inspired by the monuments of Egypt. He assembled large blocks of clay into oversized figures that resembled ancient kings and queens. Stephen created a weathered appearance by rubbing glazes into the clay while it was still wet. The misfires from his kiln were buried in the backyard of his Berkeley home. Stephen called it the bone yard. In the last years of his life, he dug up these artifacts from his own history, and the bones were rearranged, balanced into new slender figures with fragments of wings. Even if you knew nothing about his work or life or career, you sense that there is an artist dealing with these fundamental issues of life and death, decay and knitting back together, and you really feel that there's an attempt to deal with mortality and immortality. There's a seeking for a spiritual life and spiritual meaning in an existentialist age. During his 50-year career, Stephen DeStabler worked to form man out of the clay of the ground and give it the breath of life. Matter and spirit gathers the many expressions of DeStabler's meditations and gives the viewer insight into the artist's life. Learn more about the retrospective online at dyoung.famssf.org.