Yasue Maetake’s non-representational sculpture develops through sustained encounters with matter, perception, and form. Her prima materia—a proprietary compound of marine calcite, fossilized bone, quartz, and polymer—is carved through classical subtractive techniques and combined with metals and other materials. Material resistance, structural tension, and changing viewpoints remain active parts of the work.
Her practice treats error not as accident but as something that becomes meaningful through skill and judgment. Through repetition and training, craft knowledge becomes embodied: the hand can register a shift before the mind can name it. The resulting sculptures move between geological density and apparent instability, testing gravity, arrested motion, and the limits of how a physical form can be settled from any single view.
BIO
Yasue Maetake (b. 1973) is a Tokyo-born, New York-based artist. Originally trained in glass engraving in Japan, the Czech Republic, and Germany, she received her MFA from Columbia University in 2006.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, and the Toyama Glass Art Museum in Toyama, Japan.
Maetake has presented eighteen solo exhibitions internationally, including early museum and institutional exhibitions at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, the Netherlands (2008), and at institutions across the Czech Republic. Gallery solo exhibitions include Silverlens, New York (forthcoming 2027); Clara Darrason, Paris (2026); Silverlens, Manila (2025); Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami (2024); Microscope Gallery, New York (2021); THE CHIMNEY, Brooklyn (2017); Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2009); and Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami (2009).
Her work has been included in over sixty group exhibitions worldwide. Institutional presentations include the ASU Art Museum, Phoenix; Queens Museum, New York; Kimball Art Center, Park City, UT; Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York; Toyama Glass Art Museum, Japan; BankART 1929, Yokohama; and the 10th edition of Sonsbeek, Arnhem, the Netherlands. She also participated in the collateral exhibition She Persists at the 58th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Benzon, Venice.
Maetake’s work has been featured in Sculpture and reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, Frieze, and Flash Art, among other publications.
She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Sculpture, a New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Award, and a research fellowship from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, through which she completed a residency in the studio of El Anatsui in Ghana and Nigeria.