Published by Kaikai Kiki, 2019
Hardcover, 176 pages
27 x 20 cm | 10.6 x 7.9 in
Texts in English and Japanese
"I didn’t create ceramic work until I graduated from university, I was studying sculpture, which allowed me to explore all the possibilities of what I could do, and it made me discover the ceramics.”– Shigeru Otani aka Otani Workshop
Otani Workshops’ 2016 solo show with Kaikai Kiki Gallery titled “When I Was Seventeen, I Learned About Giacometti from My Art Teacher and Became Drawn to Sculpture—and So I Make Sculptures Now,” examined the historical connection between ceramics and sculptures.
Otani Workshop does not refer to a collective of artists, but to a singular, an eminently singular sculptor who has become the leading representative of Japanese ceramics. Silent and literally bulging heads, figures with their arms raised like praying figures, monumental middle fingers extended upwards, anthropomorphic vases, children, animals, soils, bronzes: Otani Workshop’s bestiary is a world in itself, a world in which dreams and tales converge as well as fantasies and daydreams, a world in which the queenly imagination and the kingly gesture triumph, in which forces and forms meet.