Kitamura Junko 北村 純子

Born Kyoto, Japan

KITAMURA JUNKO studied under two extremely influential figures in the world of Japanese ceramics: Suzuki Osamu (1926-2001), a co-founder of the avant-garde Sodeisha group, and Kondō Yutaka (1932-83), a professor at Kyoto City University of Art where Kitamura completed her MFA. Inspired by the ancient 15th-century Korean tradition of punch'ong ware with slip-inlay, Kitamura creates thickly walled, wheel-thrown ceramic vessels with intricate impressed designs, consisting of minuscule concentric dots and geometric punching. Her designs give the appearance of melding together with the adjoining configurations to make intricate patterns recalling textiles or celestial constellations when inlaid with a creamy white slip. Kitamura's contemporary clay forms have been featured in solo and group shows across the globe and now grace numerous museum collections around this country.

"When you look up at the moon in the night sky, you can feel its existence not only in the part reflecting the light of the sun, but also in the part that melts into the darkness and cannot be seen.
It seems that the part that is invisible makes the portion we can see all the more beautiful."

KITAMURA JUNKO

Like her fellow pioneering female Japanese ceramicists, Kitamura brings a fresh perspective into a field that had long excluded them. Her painterly instincts, developed as the daughter of an abstract painter, combined with the visual language of textiles and lacquer crafts that flourished in her hometown of Kyoto, inform her elegant yet otherworldly sculptures. She uses a homemade bamboo tool to incise intricate, rippling geometric patterns in white slip inlay over a dark, matte, black slip-covered body with the precision of a lacemaker. A study in contrasts, her starkly black-and-white works cut dramatic profiles that belie their fluid, curving forms.

Selected Public Collections:

National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA
Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand
British Museum, London, UK
Brooklyn Museum, NY
Cincinnati Art Museum, OH
Ibaraki Ceramic Art Museum, Japan
Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan
Kyoto Prefectural Library and Archives, Japan
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN
Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, Paris, France
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Kyoto, Japan
Museum of Modern Ceramic Art, Gifu, Japan
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
Portland Art Museum, OR
Saint Louis Art Museum, MO
Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, FL
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT