About the Exhibition

After Shinichi Sawada’s successful solo show at Venus over Manhattan in New York, his work was then profiled through Art Basel OVR: Pioneers. This online platform was dedicated to artists who have broken new aesthetic, conceptual, or socio-political ground. The presentation comprised a series of eight cereamic sculptures as a collaboration between Venus over Manhattan and Jennifer Lauren Gallery.

Thirty-eight year old Shinichi Sawada has kept the same schedule for nearly twenty years. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, he attends Nakayoshi Fukushikai, a social welfare facility in Japan’s Shiga prefecture, where he spends the morning working at the in-house bakery, making bread. He spends the afternoons working with clay. Sawada first attended this facility, one of many similar institutions in Japan designed to support people with intellectual disabilities, when he was eighteen years old, shortly after he was diagnosed with autism. In the two decades since, his ceramic beasts – sometimes ghoulish, always fantastical, and deeply redolent of ancient mythologies still coursing through Japanese culture – have attracted the attention of critics and connoisseurs worldwide, notably after a presentation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

The Art Newspaper’s Tess Thackara selected Sawada as one of five artists to seek out at Art Basel: Pioneers - Read HERE