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Ceramic Figurative Sculpture by Akio Takamori Published
About the Item
A large figurative ceramic sculpture entitled by Akio Takamori (1950 - 2017) created in 2004. Stoneware with hand-painted surface, the sculpture depicts a half-naked standing boy figure with his hands in praying position. His berobed lower body, interestingly, morphed into a highly sculptural form. The scarlet color drapery with black stripes swells and coils into shapes that resembles breasts, echoing the statue's young age. The figure was apparently based on Prince Shotoku (574-622AD), a semi-legendary regent of the Asuka period who became a cult icon as the protector of Japanese nation, its imperial family and the Buddhism religion. Prince Shotoku has thence become a popular subject for art, depicted in both paintings and sculptures. The work is signed and dated inside the base as shown.
This piece was illustrated in the catalog "Between Clouds of Memory: Akio Takamori A mid-career survey" at Arizona State University Art Museum, Ceramics Research Center in 2005. See page 131 (shown in the last photo).
Akio Takamori is a Japanese born American ceramic artist. Born and raised in Japan, he spent the majority of his artistic career in the United States and is regarded as one of the most exciting and imaginative artists to emerge from the golden years of ceramics in the 1980s.
His work is in the permanent collection of many leading museums around the world, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum. His work, Alice with Rose, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign. In 2000 the Racine Art Museum held a retrospective of his work. In 2022 the Vashon Center for the Arts held a retrospective of his work.
Quote from the catalog:
"After his signature "envelope" vessels of the 1980s, Takamori turned toward freestanding figures installed in distinctive groupings. These figurative sculptures deliver plain-spoken accounts of the artist's ongoing search for personal and cultural identity in an era of increasingly global influences and contradictions, bringing to the medium deep emotive and psychological connotations."
- Creator:Akio Takamori (Artist)
- Dimensions:Height: 33.5 in (85.09 cm)Width: 22 in (55.88 cm)Depth: 15 in (38.1 cm)
- Style:Modern (Of the Period)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:2004
- Condition:Wear consistent with age and use. Fine condition with minimal signs of wear. Surface was painted as intended per artist's practice.
- Seller Location:Atlanta, GA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU945038368512
Akio Takamori
Akio Takamori (1950 – January 11, 2017) was a Japanese-American ceramic sculptor and was a faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Takamori was born in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, Japan in 1950 October 11. The son of an obstetrician/gynecologist who ran a clinic, Takamori was exposed to a wide range of people from an early age. At home, his father’s extensive library of both art and medical texts became a fascination for Takamori, who relished everything from Picasso reproductions to anatomical charts. Takamori’s interest in the arts persisted into early adulthood and upon his graduation from the Musashino Art College in 1971, he apprenticed to a master folk potter at Koishiwara, Fukuoka, Kyushu – Koishiwara ware. While learning the craft of industrial ceramics in a factory setting, he saw a traveling exhibition of contemporary ceramic art from Latin America, Canada, and the United States. Blown away by what he describes as the “antiauthoritarian” quality of the work, Takamori began to question his future as an industrial potter. When renowned American ceramist Ken Ferguson visited the pottery, the two had an immediate rapport and Ferguson encouraged Takamori go to the United States and study with him at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1974 Takamori made the move to the United States, receiving his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute and later attending Alfred University in New York for his M.F.A. After working as a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, he moved to Seattle, Washington in 1993, where he took his current teaching position as associate professor of the ceramics department. Takamori’s evolution as an artist began as he worked with Ferguson to break free of the constraints of industrial pottery and find new ways to express himself in clay. Since those first years at the Kansas City Art Institute his work has changed greatly, but it has always been figurative, based on the human body and expressive of human emotion and sensuality. In the 1980s, Takamori worked innovatively with the vessel form and its structure, creating flat envelope shaped pots formed from slabs. In the mid-1990s a visit to the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands resulted in a shift from vessels back to an early interest in sculpture and the figure. Takamori created groupings of standing figural sculptures. The figures portray historical characters, contemporary society and rural villagers recalled from the artist's childhood in Japan. Most of Takamori’s work has been strongly influenced by his Japanese heritage. He has translated traditional Japanese prints into three-dimensional porcelain sculptures, he recreated his hometown in Japan from memory using clay, and he has translated Peter Bruegel’s paintings into sculptures of Japanese people. Takamori collaborated with Master Printer Mike Sims, of The Lawrence Lithography Workshop in Kansas City, Missouri, to create a series of prints that combine digital images of his ceramic sculptures with more traditional lithography printing techniques.
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