Artist: Shimizu Uichi

The Language of Glaze: Shimizu Uichi at 100 is a new exhibition in London marking the birth centenary of celebrated Japanese ceramicist Shimizu Uichi (1926-2004). Presented at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in collaboration with deBiousse&West, the exhibition features exceptional and previously unseen works by one of the most significant ceramic artists of the twentieth century.

Born in Kyoto, Shimizu studied pottery under Ishiguro Munemaro, developing his abilities with historical, Chinese-style ceramics dating back to the Song Dynasty. Shimizu set up his noborigama (climbing kiln) near Lake Biwa in 1970, where he developed his own modern style of ceramic art through his signature craquelure celadon-glazed works. He was declared Living National Treasure in 1985 for his mastery of tetsu-yū (iron glaze).

The new exhibition offers an encounter with the quiet authority of Shimizu’s practice, featuring vessels of great restraint whose surfaces register the complex dialogue between material, process and time. Drawn from a remarkable body of work assembled over decades, the objects reveal the disciplined clarity that defines Shimizu’s unique oeuvre, in which form, fire and glaze coexist a state of balance.

For Uichi, glaze was not merely a decorative skin but a primary field of artistic inquiry and a form of expression. The subtly modulated surfaces of his glazed vessels feature deep, iron blacks and luminous whites, perfected through the artist's precise mastery of the kiln. As autonomous, sculptural forms, the pieces articulate a language defined as much by silence as by intensity.

Never previously exhibited, the works featured in this show have remained within the artist's family’s private collection and preserved in the workshop where they were originally created. The exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery therefore shines a new light on the legacy of this pioneering ceramicist, revealing unseen creations with unusual breadth and clarity.