Stoneware vase, Nakamura Kimpei, Japan, circa 1969.

The slender, almost totemic form of this vase created by Nakamura Kimpei around 1969, seems to emerge from a movement of vertical thrust, like a material in tension, compacted, hardened. The surface is entirely worked: incisions, dots, drips and cracks compose a dense, striated, uneven skin. The earth seems clumped together, like the strata of an excavated soil, saturated with vestiges, imprints, signs. The ash-based glaze merges with the reliefs, oscillating between matte greens and browns. Discreetly placed points of enamel catch the light in places, without ever disturbing the organic reading of the whole.

The vase comes with its original, signed tomobako.

35cm x 9cm x 10cm

Created in the late 1960s, this piece marks a decisive moment for Japanese ceramics: artists were breaking away from traditional schools to explore new sculptural paths. Nakamura Kimpei, born in 1923 in Ibaraki Prefecture and trained as a sculptor at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, was one of the pioneers of this shift. From the beginning of his career, he developed his own grammar, where form no longer served a purpose but became a language in itself. Firing, glaze, and material were treated as living, unruly forces.

Rejecting traditional forms and decorative effects, he explored the raw plasticity of sandstone and the accidental effects caused by fire from the 1960s onwards, developing a singular language made of tension, density and silence.

Nakamura Kimpei is one of the major figures in 20th-century Japanese ceramics. His work, at the crossroads of sculpture and ceramics, is now featured in major collections: the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as well as Japanese and American museums. This piece, with its sculptural power and formal tension, perfectly embodies this aesthetic of material laid bare.