New Work

The Frank Lloyd Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Akio Takamori: New Work. While Takamori is most well-known for his figurative ceramics, the sculptures in this show come from a series of works in glass produced by Takamori during his visiting artist residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington. To prepare himself for this residency, the artist studied historical glass including Roman vases and bottle forms, as well as Egyptian alabaster sculpture.

After sculpting the works in clay, the artist created plaster molds of heads and sleeping figures, which were then cast in glass. The completed forms were painted in oil, allowing the artist to experiment with the translucency inherent in the material. As in his ceramic work, Takamori uses a painterly line to emphasize the subtle modeling of the forms, drawing out the expressions of each face.

Born in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, Japan in 1950, Takamori began his ceramic studies as an apprentice to a master-folk potter in Koishiwara, producing identical pieces in a factory setting. After his move to the United States in 1974, Takamori began developing a cross-cultural blend of imagery, in sculptures that have been predominantly figurative since the 1990s.

The figures that Takamori produces draw on his memories of growing up in postwar Japan and also reference paintings by Old Masters, Greek mythology, and history. Suzanne Beal of Art in America wrote in 2009 that, "being raised in Japan and coming of age in the U.S gave Takamori a dual perspective, and his work often embraces the tension of "otherness," the collision of present and past."

Please click here to view the digital catalogue for the exhibition on an iPad: