ASIA WEEK NEW YORK AUTUMN 2024 EXHIBITION
Quiet Elegance: The Ceramics of Fukumoto Fuku
September 13 – October 25, 2024
Weekday gallery hours are 11 am-6 pm during AWNY Autumn 2024 & the gallery will be open on Saturday Sept 14
It is a great pleasure to host the third solo show for Fukumoto Fuku during this Asia Week New York Autumn 2024. Quiet Elegance, The Ceramics of Fukumoto Fuku will feature over two dozen of her captivating sculptures and alluring teabowls. The sensuous work in porcelain by Fukumoto continues to enthrall collectors and curators with their soft, radiant, unglazed surfaces punctuated by glistening glazes in tones of blue ranging from the deepest cobalt or teal to powder blue or soft gray.
Starting on the wheel, she masterfully shapes each thinly walled form with organically irregular rims. For her current series of sculptural vessels, she then slices the upper area into sections before the initial bisque firing. She next re-stacks the often undulating pairings, applying gradated, colorful glazes as the “glue” between the segments before the second high-temperature firing. With the final addition of platinum or gold leaf, her finished forms may reference the ephemeral radiance of the sun or a full moon peeking through clouds or mist – a wistful beauty that belies the permanence of these heavenly bodies.
Fukumoto Fuku, who took up ceramics to distinguish herself from her parents— both successful textile artist–– has become celebrated for her remarkably thin, gracefully shaped porcelain sculptures. Although she studied at university under renowned Akiyama Yō, who for his own work, focuses on geologically inspired rough stoneware forms, she found working with the challenges of porcelain more intriguing.
Her work has been exhibited and acquired by major museums in Japan and the US and is currently featured in the traveling exhibition and its related publication, Radical Clay Contemporary Women Artists from Japan. That show, now on view at the Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota, Florida, runs concurrently with our gallery exhibit.
To learn more and view our online catalog, click here.
RECENTLY CLOSED EXHIBITION
Summer Heat
August 7 – 23, 2024
To view our fine selection of ceramics from the gallery, click here.
RECENTLY CLOSED EXHIBITION
Hagi and Oribe: Redefining Tradition
June 26 – August 1, 2024
This summer, we are excited to present an exhibition that focuses on a small selection of recent and current masters of Hagi and Oribe wares, traditions that originated during the first golden age of Japanese ceramics, the Momoyama era (1573-1615).
Created in a small town on the Japan Sea in western Honshu, the monochromatic aesthetics of Hagi were derived from Korean traditions learned from potters brought to Japan. Oribe, on the other hand, is completely a Japanese invention that favored bright asymmetrical patterning and brilliant green coloring. It was developed in central Japan in the Mino region. The elegant simplicity of form coupled with the unctuous white Hagi glaze or the deep black or green vibrancy of Oribe have made these ceramic wares popular for use in tea ceremony for centuries. But it was not until after the Meiji restoration, in the late nineteenth century, that both Hagi and Oribe-glazed works were produced for and reached a broader audience in Japan and the newly opened international export market.
We invite you to visit this focused exhibition on view at the gallery from June 26 to August 23. The gallery will be open to visitors daily from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Monday–Friday.
To learn more and view the online exhibition catalog, click here.
ZOOM GALLERY TALK AVAILABLE TO VIEW
Art of the People: Exploring the Mingei Film Archive
Recorded on Thursday, April 18, 2024 at 5pm EDT
Perhaps one of the best-known aspects of Japanese ceramics in the West remains the Mingei folk art movement and its leading proponents, Hamada Shōji and Bernard Leach. Because of their advocacy and publicly facing roles, aided greatly by the medium of film, the timeless qualities of Mingei have figured prominently in the perception of Japanese art in the West throughout the twentieth century. For this unique ZOOM Gallery Talk, filmmaker Marty Gross shares with us his extraordinary mission to restore, record, preserve, and archive the films of and about Mingei from the early twentieth century in his project, The Mingei Film Archive. He will share with us rare footage of prewar Japan and of pottery production in centers such as Tamba and Mashiko. As a potter himself, Marty Gross shares with us how the Mingei Film Archive developed and how his personal journey merged his two great artistic interests to create this remarkable and irreplaceable resource for ceramics and for Japanese art lovers.
Panelist:
Marty Gross, filmmaker and founder of The Mingei Film Archive, based in Toronto, Canada
Moderated by Joan Mirviss
To view the recording of this talk, please click here.
