Shinichi Sawada: Messengers: Gallery Exhibition at 52 Walker Street

While rooted in traditional techniques, Shinichi Sawada’s ceramics possess an otherworldly beauty, situated in a language of his own making. Since 2000, Sawada has attended Nakayoshi Fukushikai–a social welfare organization for disabled individuals–where he creates ceramics that are wood-fired in a hand-made kiln situated in the mountains. The artist, who is predominantly nonverbal, takes a regimented approach to building his richly imaginative forms. He spends several days at a time sculpting each work–carefully adding his signature spikes to clay bodies one-by-one. Messengers spans two decades of hauntingly expressive and chimerical sculptures by the artist and is organized in partnership with Jennifer Lauren Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom.

In 2024, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in St. Louis, Missouri and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina will host the first touring solo exhibition of Sawada’s work in the United States. 

His work is closely connected to the millennia-old practice of Japanese Shigaraki pottery; he uses the same clay, tools, and wood firing processes as generations of makers before him. Sawada is uninterested in creating utilitarian objects, instead opting to create rough surfaces that also happen to be incredibly delicate. His ceramic sculptures can be read as incantations of emotion, linked to Shigaraki tradition in their meditative and ritualistic quality; they are not vessels for tea or sake, but rather, are spaces for contemplation.

Sawada’s chimerical forms have a sentient quality and are emotive in their fierce expressions, particularly true with Untitled (143), 2018, whose intense glare is only exacerbated by horned appendages. Despite their intimate scale, they contain a powerful totemic presence, as if they are guardians, keepers of secrets, or messengers.

“The simple process of rolling the clay and making it pointy. He’s able to express his world, and his emotions through that.” - Masaharu Iketani, who for many years has facilitated Sawada at the studio

Images of the artist and ceramics facility: Courtesy the artist, James Cohan, New York, Jennifer Lauren Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom, and Nakayoshi Fukushikai.

Carla Shulz-Hoffman, "Shinichi Sawada, A Fresh Look?", published on the occasion of the exhibition Shinichi Sawada, Ceramic - Alfred Kremer, Ink at the Museum Lothar Fischer, 2020, p.18-19.