Yo Akiyama & Genta Ishizuka

Erskine, Hall & Coe are pleased to present Yo Akiyama & Genta Ishizuka, an exhibition of ceramics and lacquer work by two acclaimed Japanese artists.  The show will run from the 2nd through the 24th of October.

Following his win of this year’s LOEWE Craft Prize, Genta Ishizuka’s lacquer sculptures will be shown for a second time at our gallery.  This follows his first European exhibition, Membrane, which we displayed last year.

Born in Kyoto in 1982, Ishizuka currently lives and works in Kyoto City.  He earned a BFA from Kyoto City University of Arts, during which time he participated in an exchange program at the Royal College of Art, London in 2006.  Most recently, he graduated with a MFA in Urushi Lacquering from Kyoto City University of Arts in 2008.  His work is included in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

A major artwork by Yo Akiyama has recently gone on display at the QM Gallery Katara in Qatar.  This will be the first time we will have exhibited his ceramics in our gallery.

Akiyama was born in Shimonoseki in 1953 and currently lives and works in Kyoto.  He was a student of sculptor Kazuo Yagi and a follower of the Sodeisha movement, an influential Japanese post-war ceramic group which rejected traditional methods of making and instead focused on using clay to create abstract sculptures.  Akiyama has been a recipient of many awards since 1986, including the prestigious Mokichi Okada Award, which he won in 2010.  His work is also included in important international public collections, such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Sèvres National Ceramics Museum in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

We would like to thank ARTCOURT Gallery for their generous help in making this exhibition possible.