ABOUT: Yasue Maetake's approach to art hinges on her appreciation of material reductionism as an outset to unchain the human imagination. Her sculptures, crafted with what she calls terrestrial materials such as animal bones, aquatic objects, fossils, quartz, resin, metal and glass lie in the ambiguity of the nonrepresentational character. Evoking multiple solidifications in form, not comprising images that should be final and permanently remembered as conventional monuments, but for engaging in a sense of paradoxical permanence through transformation that can produce chain reactions of primary substances, Maetake’s material processes and conscious processes unfold one after another, and the animistic overlap: manmade, natural, or divine?
BIO: Yasue Maetake is a Tokyo-born New York based artist, originally trained in glass engraving in Japan, the Czech Republic, and Germany before settling in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at numerous national and international institutions such as Espacio 1414 at the Berezdivin Collection, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Queens Art Museum, New York; 10th Sonsbeek, Arnhem, Netherlands; and ASU Art Museum, Arizona, amongst others. Solo exhibitions include Fons Welters, Amsterdam, The Chimney, New York, Microscope, New York, and Nina Johnson, Miami, and others. Maetake’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine and reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, ArtAsiaPacific, FlashArt, amongst others. Maetake was named one of “20 international women advancing the field of sculpture” by Artsy, is a recipient of the NYFA Fellowship in Sculpture, and she also completed a residency in the studio of El Anatsui in Ghana sponsored by a research grant from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan. Yasue Maetake earned her MFA from Columbia University in New York.