UPCOMING AUTUMN EXHIBITION:
Expanding Earth: New Works by Yukiya Izumita
September 12 – October 3, 2024
Opening Reception with Artist: Thursday, September 12, 6-8pm
Kindly RSVP: [email protected] or (212) 967-4899
This autumn, we are excited to present Expanding Earth: New Works by Yukiya Izumita, marking the leading ceramicist’s return to New York with his fifth solo exhibition in the United States. Over 40 of Izumita’s latest laminate-layered sculptures, flat-folded vases, and tea bowls will be on view from September 12 to October 3, 2024. Izumita’s unseen sceneries of earthen formations demonstrate his capacity to push the physical constraints of hand-built ceramic and miraculously defy the laws of gravity withstanding the intensity of the anagama tunnel-kiln fire.
Yukiya Izumita (b. 1966) has established himself as a most innovative ceramicist from his remote kiln in Japan’s north-east Tohoku region. He seamlessly integrates the geographically-specific elements of Iwate Prefecture—namely its harsh northern climate and rural seaside locale—into the black, yellow, and red clay. Izumita hand-carries the coastal clay back to his studio in huge loads and driftwood, too, is an aspect of his craft; his creations are born from what is washed ashore and the sea-soaked salvages lend a rudimentary salt-firing element that appears rustic and ancient encased in rare manganese glaze. Izumita seeks out a language of lightness in his sculptures that expertly disguises the heavy reality of earth. His designs seem to float without concern; the ceramic walls are shaped on paper sheets at calculated angles in perfect balance. The salt-rich clay is combined with Chamotte to emulate the rough-hewn texture and colors of Iwate’s sea-battered cliff faces like a fossil record of the passage of time.
Izumita’s expression of rock, geochronology, and the tumultuous landscape is deeply intertwined with the sorts of wares he sculpts. He is not ambivalent towards functionality, and in fact Izumita first trained under potter Gakuho Shimodake in Kokuji-ware, which is long lauded within the mingei movement. Izumita persists in Noda Village despite tsunami and other disasters that test his ceramic practice; he has subsumed these experiences into a sensibility for the delicate and naturalistic. His rhythmical and dynamic sheets of clay folded into looping spirals and stacking layers are like the rolling tides breaking on the shore.
Iwate and its climate are as much a part of Izumita himself as his sculptorly hands. At home amongst the weathered land and seascapes, Izumita remains devoted to authentically representing the realities of Japan’s inhospitable northern coasts. His works are exhibited to wide acclaim across Japan, and now, as he prepares for his fifth solo exhibition with Ippodo Gallery New York, Izumita’s ceramics are held in the permeant collections of world-class collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, and Minneapolis Institute of Art. In Japan, Izumita is the recipient of accolades including the Excellence Award at the 20th Biennial Japan Ceramic Art Exhibition in 2009 and the Asahi Ceramic Exhibition Grand Prix in 2000 and 2002.
Ippodo Gallery and Yukiya Izumita welcome a collaboration with Bronze Craft Foundry to cast a limited edition of sculptures from the artist’s original ceramic forms, which will also be included in the exhibition.
To learn more, click here.
RECENTLY CLOSED EXHIBITION:
Laura de Santillana: Echoes of Her Gaze
Impressions of Tokyo and Kyoto in Glass
May 15– June 29, 2024
After a successful presentation of the Italian Venetian artist Massimo Micheluzzi this past April, we now proudly present another Italian Venetian artist in our gallery, Laura de Santillana. Echoes of Her Gaze, Impressions of Tokyo and Kyoto in Glass will be the artist’s second posthumous solo exhibition in New York with a curated show of over 25 glass artworks evoking the dichotomy of Tokyo’s neon lights and subdued glow of Kyoto’s aesthetics. Representing the later years of her career, this collaboration between the de Santillana Estate and our gallery includes artworks traveling from Venice and those which were exhibited exclusively in Japan. Deeply inspired by the ingenious craftsmanship of Japanese architecture, this series of glass tablets draws together the vibrant colors that de Santillana saw in Tokyo’s bustling nightlife districts with the traditional modesty of Kyoto, where she felt a natural fondness for ancient Japanese culture analogous to the grand history of Venice.
The great bridging power of de Santillana’s glass is the sensuality of her artistic vision; she saw within glass beauty and tenderness nary another has brought to life with such vivid effect. A transformation occurs as light is diffused in color or passes through the translucent glass. What was once light becomes distorted, refracted, or purified. De Santillana’s works, imagined first in sketches and then executed at her direction, are the product of maestros and engineers who blow and manipulate the folded glass at extreme temperatures. Meticulously formulated colors made from natural pigments or metals are inserted during the firing process, only realizing their true brilliance once pulled from the fire.
Laura de Santillana’s (1955–2019) innovated Venetian-Murano glass techniques were passed down through the lineage of her grandfather, the legendary Paolo Venini. Under his tutelage, de Santillana developed her own vision of what could be expressed in glass. De Santillana’s sculptures, including her tablet-shaped Tokyo-ga series, use innovative techniques, masterful compositions of colors, and several formal and artistic gestures explored during her early career in Murano, and which she later perfected with collaborators in the Czech Republic and the United States.
To learn more, click here.
ABOUT THE GALLERY
Ippodo Gallery is a cultural bridge to Japan’s living master artists. Founded in Tokyo (1996-), the New York gallery (2008-) presents fine handcrafted and rare works created using traditional materials and methods. Each piece selected embodies Japanese aesthetic sensitivity that is born of a spiritual bond with nature. Ippodo’s exhibition program features unique objects — fine ceramics, lacquerware, metal crafts, sculpture, paintings, and works on paper — that celebrate human invention, the natural world, and sublime beauty.
