The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay brings together works by four artists across three generations of one of Japan’s most influential artistic families: Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985), his sons Kondō Yutaka (1932–1983) and Kondō Hiroshi (1936–2012), and Hiroshi’s son Kondō Takahiro (b. 1958). The exhibition traces a century of practice within this single family lineage. It is presented in partnership with the Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz Collection, a major private collection of modern and contemporary Japanese ceramics.
The works are grounded in porcelain and sometsuke, a technique in which cobalt pigment is painted beneath a clear glaze and fired at high temperatures, creating a blue-and-white design. Named a Living National Treasure (ningen kokuhō) in 1977, Kondō Yūzō expanded this tradition beyond established pictorial and functional conventions. Later generations approached his legacy not as a template but as a point of departure. Across vessels and sculptural forms, each artist engages material, surface, and form in distinct ways, moving between function and nonfunction, continuity and change. For Kondō Takahiro, this inheritance extends into the present through works attentive to the power of nature and contemporary experiences. Together, these sixty works by four Kondō family artists offer a focused meditation on transmission, experimentation, and the enduring expressive capacity of clay.