Ogawa Machiko

Gallery Hashimoto, Tokyo

Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Nagoya, Machiko Ogawa: Archetypal Vessels, 17th September - 25th December 2011

Ogawa Machiko is one Japan’s most celebrated contemporary ceramicists. Renowned for her experimental and inventive approach to clay, Ogawa’s work displays a lifetime fascination with geological forms, mineralogy and the different effects of extreme heat and pressure.

Born in 1946, Sapporo, the largest city of the Hokkaido Prefecture of Japan, Ogawa studied crafts at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music where she was a student of Fujimoto Yoshimichi (1919-1992), Kato Hajime (1900-1968) and Tamura Koichi (1918-1987). Graduating in 1969, she then went on to study ceramics at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Art in Paris until 1971, and then in Burkina Faso, West Africa until 1975 where she studied local ceramic techniques. Applying this to her understanding of Africa’s geological forms, Ogawa developed her own unique style creating objects that appear to have emerged from the earth as if hewn from its very depths.

Ogawa’s first solo exhibition was in 1985 and was an instant success. She was awarded the Japan Ceramic Society Prize in 2001, amongst other prizes and has been exhibited internationally. Ogawa’s works are in numerous public collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The MET), the Yale University Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

For an example of a tea bowl in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (The V&A), accession number FE.30-2017, go to:

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1380793/ tea-bowl-ogawa-machiko/

For a different example of a porcelain and glass sculpture in the Brooklyn Museum, accession number 2020.1.6, go to:

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/ opencollection/objects/224833