Ryo Toyonaga was born in Matsuyama, Japan, in 1960. He moved to New York City in 1986 and began creating unique and innovative ceramic works that appeared to emerge from the earth itself, perhaps from the depths of the ocean or recesses deep in forgotten mines.

Ryo Toyonaga’s Artwork

During the 1990s, Toyonaga worked exclusively in hand-sculpted clay. The forms developed organically and spontaneously from Toyonaga’s unconscious, without any drawings or plans prior to the making. As the organic energy flowed and changed within his imagination, Toyonaga expanded his vocabulary of expression and materials, including the introduction of red wax in 2002 and bronze and aluminum casting in 2004. With an interest in increasing the size and stance of his works, Toyonaga began exploring large-scale papier-mâché in 2005.

Toyonaga establishes a tension between the control and the resistance, the artificial and the organic, between homogeneity and disturbed individuality. His sculptures are provocative; they can, in fact, be unpleasant, triggering in their viewers memories of pain and suffering. Toyonaga deliberately creates these disturbing objects, a counter to the superficiality of today’s Japanese culture, as explained by writer Haruki Murakami “[It is] the collective effort to transform Japan’s horrendous experience of nuclear annihilation.”

Toyonaga’s earliest works, produced in his Manhattan studio, are characterized by geometric structures that evoke germinating seeds that blossom into surrealist flowers. The valves and pipes in some of his other pieces elicit images of the plumbing and waterworks intrinsic to an urban infrastructure, and recall the rezoning projects that rose during Japan’s bubble economy, when rapid gentrification and commercial development ravaged traditional landscapes and disrupted the lives of ordinary people. Restrictions and administrative constraints are conveyed via the thrust of pipes that firmly fix the growth from the seeds and the valves controlling the flow of water. In works created at his Port Chester, New York, studio, control and resistance metamorphose into eerie robotic growths, penetrating the outer shell of fossil-like organic structures.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

• “Awakening,” Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR, October, 2014 – January, 2015
• “Mindscapes,” Sidney Mishkin Gallery, NYC, May-June, 2013
• “Organic Stoneware,” LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, NY, May-October, 2010
• “Drawings, 2008-9,” Charles Cowles Gallery, NYC, April, 2009
• “Mephistophelean,” The Vilcek Foundation Gallery, NYC, March , 2009
• “Sculptures in Clay, Metal and Mixed Media,” Charles Cowles Gallery, NYC, May, 2006