Mako Artigas, textiles from silence

Madrid,

Mako Artigas was born in Tokyo eighty -eight years ago and in Japan he lived until after World War II; move to the West – in the same time in which other artists of his generation would do, such as Yoko Ono, Shigeko Kubota and Yayoi Kusama – would allow him to know the art that was then cultivated in the United States and Europe.

In Spain, he stressed in 1960, and here, in addition to continuing with stamping studies that he had previously initiated, he married Joan Gardy Artigas, sculptor and son of Josep Llorens Artigas, the great ceramist who knew how to combine the simplicity of his creations, classicism and contemporaneity, and was one of the first members of the Escola dels Bells Official Catalan

Once again, his new family ties reinforced Mako’s work on the textile path: before, both his father and his mother lived from that industry. And it became an international figure: between the sixties and the eighties he collaborated for French brands dedicated to the home and also for firms of prêt-a-porter and Haute Couture, from Dior to Kenzo through Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci or Courrèges. To both terrain, the domestic and that of the elegant sphere, carried its geometric and abstract shapes, almost always deployed in bright colors and sometimes linked to nature: flowers or animals.

His stays, together with his Spanish family, in Gallifa, where the Artigas had firewood ovens, led him to enter the ceramic work, until he ended up settling in this municipality of the Western Vallés and leaving – until a certain point – aside the handling of the fabrics by the manufacture of more intimate pieces, such as bowls, plates, vases and jewelry vegetable, always present in its production.

Already in this 21st century, Mako chose to study the chromatic expressiveness of enamel in pebbles and clay apples, small animal figures made with his son Isao and, finally, from 2022 and 2023, in pieces of jewelry, of enameled ceramics, sets and porcelain.

Even active in her workshop of that Catalan town, the artist stars in the Royal Tapestry Factory the exhibition “Mako and the Japanese textile”, which has already been seen in Salamanca and welcomes representative pieces of those various facets of her career: drawings and designs for fabrics, ceramics and enamels, in addition to photographs and a documentary prepared for the occasion by home.

Ricardo Bru is the commissioner of this exhibition, which is structured in three parts: a first that brings together, in addition to textiles that carried out in Japan and France, ancient Katagami that was brought from Japan, drawings for designs by Kenzo, Dior, Courrèges and Paco Rabanne and ceramics; A second that summarized file images preserved by the artist herself, some taken in Gallifa with Joan Miró, Picasso and Calder, and finally a third that consists of the aforementioned documentary, which deepens both in her life and in her work.

For the commissioner, he has nothing casual for the tree to be one of its recurring motifs: As the poet Bashō sang when celebrating the beauty of the silence of some petals touching when falling, Mako’s work has been developed and grown since humility and silence and, in a stealthy way, he has managed to find a fruitful path in the forest, investigating with freedom between the thousand forms of nature, Japanese aesthetics and the art of the twentieth century. Mako Artigas has drunk with many trees, trees and flowers of life, to bloom and now shine with its own character and great personality.