NEW YORK, NY.- Erik Thomsen Gallery is presenting its second exhibition of work by Fukami Sueharu, widely regarded as one of the greatest ceramic artists of the last forty years. “Fukami Sueharu: Porcelain Sculptures, 1980–2014,” is on view from September 16 to October 31 at the Erik Thomsen Gallery on 23 East 67th Street.

As noted by leading Fukami scholar Maezaki Shinya in his catalog essay, the exhibition “brings together a group of works representing the highest achievements of a career that has witnessed continuous technical and artistic refinement ever since Fukami was in his thirties.”

Born in Kyoto in 1947, Fukami Sueharu is widely celebrated for his ceramic sculptures that are either thrown on the wheel or made by injecting liquid slip clay into a plaster mold at high pressure. Originally an industrial technique, high-pressure slip casting was developed and refined by Fukami as a means of fashioning soaring, graceful forms that are finished in a luminous bluish-white glaze that originated in 11th-century China.

Fukami’s artistic achievements have been recognized by a wide range of honors including the Grand Prize at the International Ceramic Exhibition at Faenza, Italy and two Gold Medals from the Japan Ceramics Society. His work is in private collections and museums all over the world including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the British Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The world’s largest private Fukami collection, at the Clark Center for Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, CA, was recently donated to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The present exhibition, the third major commercial presentation of Fukami’s work to be held in New York, comprises 30 works spanning four decades from 1980 up to 2014, with the bulk of the exhibits being coming from a show held last fall at the gallery of the Japanese Garden in Portland, OR. Alongside important early works, the exhibition includes two major vertical masterpieces, Kitsu (Upright) and Landscape II, which was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2003 to 2013.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.