A bestiary of unreal ceramic creatures

Venus Over Manhattan will present the first United States solo exhibition of Shinichi Sawada, one of the most recognised art brut artists from Japan, on view starting February 24th.

Demons, monsters, masks— Sawada’s works are characterized by hundreds of skips of clay “that give them an intricate and frightful beauty”. His figures are striking for their combinations of natural and mythical attributes: a single sculpture may comprise the wings of a bird, the face of a dragon, and the claws of a lizard, but finally suggest the profile of an owl.

When in 2013, the artist’s works were featured in the central exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennalle, it removed them from the context of “outsider art,” and marked a significant development in the contextualization of work traditionally termed “self-taught” or “art brut”. Massimiilano Gioni, the curator of 55th Venice Biennale expressed that the works of a the Japanese artist “seem to contain so many variations of things I had seen before. I liked how they connected to centuries of imaginary beings (which immediately complicates any reductive reading of self-taught art as developing outside traditions and art history). [...] And I loved combination of the fidelity—realism, if you will— and freedom of imagination. They displayed a faith in the power of imagination, depicted with absolute precision, that I had rarely encountered before.”