Joan B Mirviss LTD is delighted to announce our forthcoming exhibition, Into the Earth: The Clay Art of Ogawa Machiko, our third solo show of this female master, a force in the Japanese art world. Featuring two main bodies of work, the show will focus on her minerology and torn sculpture series.

A longtime collector of rocks and minerals as a result of her extensive international travels, Ogawa Machiko (b. 1946) equates the joy she feels from her creative process to that of a miner, who after years of excavating, at long last discovers a vein of ore.  Her mineralogy series pays tribute to such discoveries with each fragmented rock-like sculpture seemingly hewn from the depths of the earth  and embedded with crystals in its matrix. In fact, they are created through patient sculpting and multiple firings using different clays, varied forms of glass, and added minerals.

Machiko has been a vital force in the dialogue of contemporary clay since her arrival on the scene in1985. After study at Tokyo University of the Arts, she drew inspiration from her travels, which included living and studying in Paris at the École d’Arts et Métiers and then in Burkina Faso in West Africa. AS one of only six women to win the prestigious Japan Ceramic Society Award, she has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at major galleries and museums throughout Japan. Her work was featured in two seminal US exhibitions: Touch Fire: Contemporary Japanese Ceramics by Women Artists in 2009 and Contemporary Clay: Japanese Ceramics for the New Century in 2007. Her work is in the permanent collection of major museums throughout the world including National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura; Suntory Museum of Art; and in the United States at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston.