About the Exhibition
Beginning February 24th, Venus Over Manhattan presented the first United States solo exhibition of Shinichi Sawada’s ceramic sculptures. The showcase of thirty works followed a recent museum solo exhibition that traveled in fall 2020 from the Museum Lothar Fischer, in Neumarkt, Germany, to the George Kolbe Museum, Berlin. On view through end of March, the Venus exhibition was organised in collaboration with Jennifer Lauren Gallery, Manchester, UK, who has worked with the artist for many years.
In conjunction with its presentation, Venus published a generously illustrated catalogue featuring new and recent writing on Sawada’s art.
Thirty-eight year old Shinichi Sawada has kept the same schedule for nearly twenty years. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, he attends Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare facility in Japan’s Shiga prefecture, where he spends the morning working at the in-house bakery, making bread. He spends the afternoons working with clay. Sawada first attended this facility, one of many similar institutions in Japan designed to support people with intellectual disabilities, when he was eighteen years old, shortly after he was diagnosed with autism. In the two decades since, his ceramic beasts – sometimes ghoulish, always fantastical, and deeply redolent of ancient mythologies still coursing through Japanese culture – have attracted the attention of critics and connoisseurs worldwide, notably after a presentation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.
Building on both personal observations and pure imagination, Sawada continues to accrue a body of work with layers of intrigue and inventive craftsmanship.
This exhibition was reviewed in the New York Times with Jillian Steinhauer saying, “His sculptures are rich with allusions. The cartoonish, sometimes possessed looks of his creatures recall imagery from Japanese mythology and medieval bestiaries. The spikes and lines covering their bodies suggest ritual scarification. The big eyes and gaping mouths of more recent pieces echo shamanistic masks from a host of cultures. Sawada’s sculptures are made in isolation, but they gain resonance and meaning in the wider world.”
You can read it HERE.
This exhibition was also been profiled in T Magazine, through the New York Times by Courtney Coffman, which you can read HERE.
NOTE: With the virtual tour below, please click on the small arrow that says ‘play’ and it will automatically walk you around the space.