Important Ceramic Sculpture Karako by Akio Takamori Exhibited and Published

Details

Description

Large figurative ceramic sculpture entitled "Karako" by Akio Takamori (1950 - 2017) created in 2005. Stoneware with hand-painted surface, the … Read more Large figurative ceramic sculpture entitled "Karako" by Akio Takamori (1950 - 2017) created in 2005. Stoneware with hand-painted surface, the sculpture depicts a berobed boy in a sitting position. Karako in Japanese means "Tang Child", a term used for little children at play, in traditional art form, such as the paintings. The term can be traced back to the historical Tang Period when Japan was heavily influenced by the art and culture of the Chinese dynasty.
This important piece was exhibited in "Between Clouds of Memory: Akio Takamori A mid-career survey in 2005 at Arizona State University Art Museum, Ceramics Research Center (cat. no. 42) and illustrated in the exhibition catalog page 115 (see 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." See less