Closed Form

Toshiko TakaezuWW-1970-141944

1970·Stoneware and glaze·14 × 15.3 cm (5 1/2 × 6 in.)

<p>As a highly skilled and sought-after instructor, Toshiko Takaezu taught in such prestigious ceramics programs as those at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Princeton University. By the early 1980s, the artist had access to sizeable kilns at Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York, where she taught summer workshops. As a result of these expanded facilities and access to personnel, she experimented with large structures that could reach well over six feet in height. These works became a canvas for Takaezu’s gestural brushstrokes; her deliberate and spare application of glaze here achieves the same emotional potential as Abstract Expressionist painting.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1970
Medium: Stoneware and glaze
Dimensions: 14 × 15.3 cm (5 1/2 × 6 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Toshiko Takaezu

Artist

Toshiko Takaezu

Painting

Toshiko Takaezu was an American ceramic artist, painter, sculptor, textile artist and educator whose oeuvre spanned a wide range of mediums, including ceramics, weavings, bronzes, and paintings. She was noted for her pioneering work in ceramics and played an important role in the international revival of interest in the ceramic arts. Takaezu is known for her rounded, closed ceramic forms which broke from traditions of clay as a medium for functional objects. Instead she explored clay's potential for aesthetic expression, taking on Abstract Expressionist concepts in a manner that places her work in the realm of postwar abstractionism. She was of Japanese descent and from Pepeeko, Hawaii.

Pepeekeo, HI, USA

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