SANTA FE, NM.- No stranger to scale, Jun Kaneko, who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970’s California Contemporary Ceramics Movement, is considered a pioneer in the world of large scale ceramics. On exhibition is four of Kaneko’s recent dangos. Measuring nearly 6 feet tall and weighing nearly 1,500 lbs, each dango takes nearly 4 months to dry and up to 37-days to fire. These monumental works acknowledge the skill and achievements of the artist. In contrast to the giant dangos, the gallery will also present Kaneko’s recent small works called constructions, built together with up to three separate shapes, often measuring no greater than 1 foot in each direction. However, regardless of size, each sculpture, whether large or small, carries the distinct flavor of Kaneko.
Much of this distinction is owed to a decision Kaneko made early in his career to restrict his color palette. Black, white, gray, red, light blue, golden yellow and metallic bronze remain the fundamental colors in his design arsenal. This set of colors is then deployed in a larger lexicon of mainly geometric motifs, including dots, drips, splashes, triangles, squares, and most especially lines. The essential principle of variety within unity instills in Kaneko’s works a feeling of action inside stasis, of accumulation and of movement in place. The varied widths, colors, and textures among the sculpture’s stripes, dots or shapes – the variation of wash and scumble, wet and dry, and of blurred and hard-edged lines – create a richness of multiplicity within the relentless regularity of their structure.
Jun Kaneko was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1942. He studied painting with Satoshi Ogawa during his adolescence - working in his studio during the day and attending high school in the evening. He came to the United States in 1963 to continue his studies at Chouinard Institute of Art when his introduction to Fred Marer drew him to sculptural ceramics. He studied with Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, and Jerry Rothman in California during the time now defined as The Contemporary Ceramics Movement in America. The following decade, Kaneko taught at some of the nation’s leading art schools, including Scripps College, Rhode Island School of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Based in Omaha since 1986, his artwork appears in numerous international and national solo and group exhibitions annually, and is included in more than seventy museum collections. He has realized over thirty public art commissions in the United States and Japan and is the recipient of national, state and organization fellowships. Kaneko holds honorary doctorates from the University of Nebraska, the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and the Royal College of Art in London.
