Ceramic Figurative Sculpture by Akio Takamori Published

A large figurative ceramic sculpture entitled by Akio Takamori (1950 - 2017) created in 2004. Stoneware with hand-painted surface, the sculpture depicts a half-naked standing boy figure with his hands in praying position. His berobed lower body, interestingly, morphed into a highly sculptural form. The scarlet color drapery with black stripes swells and coils into shapes that resembles breasts, echoing the statue's young age. The figure was apparently based on Prince Shotoku (574-622AD), a semi-legendary regent of the Asuka period who became a cult icon as the protector of Japanese nation, its imperial family and the Buddhism religion. Prince Shotoku has thence become a popular subject for art, depicted in both paintings and sculptures. The work is signed and dated inside the base as shown.
This piece was illustrated in the catalog "Between Clouds of Memory: Akio Takamori A mid-career survey" at Arizona State University Art Museum, Ceramics Research Center in 2005. See page 131 (shown in the last photo).
Akio Takamori is a Japanese born American ceramic artist. Born and raised in Japan, he spent the majority of his artistic career in the United States and is regarded as one of the most exciting and imaginative artists to emerge from the golden years of ceramics in the 1980s.
His work is in the permanent collection of many leading museums around the world, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum. His work, Alice with Rose, was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of the Renwick Gallery's 50th Anniversary Campaign. In 2000 the Racine Art Museum held a retrospective of his work. In 2022 the Vashon Center for the Arts held a retrospective of his work.
Quote from the catalog:
"After his signature "envelope" vessels of the 1980s, Takamori turned toward freestanding figures installed in distinctive groupings. These figurative sculptures deliver plain-spoken accounts of the artist's ongoing search for personal and cultural identity in an era of increasingly global influences and contradictions, bringing to the medium deep emotive and psychological connotations."