Victor Spinski (October 10, 1940 – January 21, 2013) was an American artist and professor best known for his ceramic works in the trompe l'oeil (French for "fool the eye") style.
Following his discharge from the Marines, Spinski enrolled in graduate school at Indiana University Bloomington, where he studied ceramics under well-known functional potter Karl Martz and received an M.F.A.
[3] Clayworks established Spinski as a peer of other ceramic innovators featured in the exhibition, which included Robert Arneson, Patti Warashina, Jack Earl, David Gilhooly, Marilyn Levine, Richard Shaw, and Clayton Bailey.
Initially, Spinski's work centered around the creation of imagined machines and technical equipment that were created in sections on the potter's wheel, then assembled into sculptures that could measure in excess of four feet in height.
Spinski's work also traveled extensively from 1978 through 1982 in the exhibition A Century of Ceramics in the United States, curated by Garth Clark and Margie Hughto for the Everson Museum of Art.
He continued to mix wry visual humor--such as a 1995 sculpture entitled Misdirected Forward Pass in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that depicts a wayward football that has landed in a bowl of roasted peanuts, with more subtle compositions made up of trompe l'oeil rusted tools and cardboard.