McClain Gallery is pleased to announce an eponymous exhibition by the Hawaiian-born ceramist Toshiko Takaezu. The celebrated artist is known for her experimental approach to abstract sculpture, wherein she expanded her three-dimensional objects to an exploration of sound, tactility, and mark-making. Takaezu used her personal cultural background as much as the contemporary art concerns of her day to make work that was Abstract Expressionist at its core, but expanded the field through her hands, her vision, and her dedication to a multi-disciplinary practice. Our exhibition features a range of forms from the 1960s through the 1990s.
Takaezu’s oeuvre is made up of mostly closed forms, a term used to describe objects thrown in clay on the wheel. Unlike their more familiar functional counterparts made on the equipment (like plates, bowls, and teapots), closed forms follow the suggestion of their name and are closed off at the top. Many of Takaezu’s objects are globe-like, a series she called Moons. Others taper at the top in a delicate tip. Some of her sculptures tower to be the size of a person’s body, a monumental job for which she stood on a stool and built the clay up to her height. Elizabeth Essner, the Windgate Foundation Associate Curator of Craft at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), reminds us of the void inside each of Takaezu’s objects, and points out, in her essay in Renaissance, the MFAH’s Magazine, that some are filled with a small lump of clay, turning the objects into tuning bodies with unseen rattles. A sound rings like a bell when the objects are handled. Essner writes: “From the ever-present vessel form, Takaezu had found – or perhaps invented – a new world within.”
Born in Hawaii to Japanese parents originally from Okinawa, TOSHIKO TAKAEZU (b. 1922, Pepeekeo, HI; d. 2011, Honolulu, HI) attended Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, a powerhouse where many modern masters were trained and where she eventually taught. She also taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at Princeton University. Starting March 1, her work is on view at the MFAH in the exhibition Worlds Within, which traveled there from the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. Her work is included in many private and public collections including the MFAH.
We are grateful to James Cohan Gallery for their collaboration.