Beginning February 24th, Venus Over Manhattan will present the first United States solo exhibition of Shinichi Sawada’s ceramic sculptures. The showcase of thirty works follows a recent museum solo exhibition that traveled in fall 2020 from the Museum Lothar Fischer, in Neumarkt, Germany, to the George Kolbe Museum, Berlin. On view through late March, the Venus exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Jennifer Lauren Gallery, Manchester, UK, who has worked with the artist for many years.

In conjunction with its presentation, Venus will publish a generously illustrated catalogue featuring new and recent writing on Sawada’s art.

The Nakayoshi Fukushikai facility where Shinichi Sawada practices his art, exists within Japan’s expansive social welfare system and seeks to offer those it serves with the “most widely varied instruction possible, without pressure and excessively rigid rules, supported by volunteers in the fields of agriculture, education, medicine, psychology, literature, and art.” When Sawada, who is mostly non-verbal, endeavored to pursue ceramics, he found such support in a team that was prepared to help him, including a ceramics facilitator named Mr. Masaharu Iketani, who has worked with Sawada from day one.

In 2013, a large group of Sawada’s works featured prominently in “The Encyclopedic Palace,” the central exhibition at the 55th Venice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni. Speaking about his choice to include Sawada’s works, Gioni explained that “they seem to contain so many variations of things I had seen before. I liked how they connected to centuries of imaginary beings (which immediately complicates any reductive reading of self-taught art as developing outside traditions and art history). […] And I loved combination of the fidelity—realism, if you will— and freedom of imagination. They displayed a faith in the power of imagination, depicted with absolute precision, that I had rarely encountered before.”

The presentation of Sawada’s works at the Venice Biennale removed them from the context of “outsider art,” and marked a significant development in the contextualization of work traditionally termed “self-taught” or “art brut”. In the years since the Biennale presentation, Sawada’s work has continued to complicate more conservative histories of artistic production. While operating within the conventions of traditional Japanese ceramic making, Sawada’s work evokes and can be seen in rich relationship to many art historical precedents that draw on the fantastic. These include, as Gioni noted, “Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, medieval bestiaries, and pre-Columbian sculpture.”

Building on both personal observations and pure imagination, Sawada continues to accrue a body of work with layers of intrigue and inventive craftsmanship.