52. Matsuda Yuriko  松田百合子 

Matsuda Yuriko was born in Hyögo in 1943 and studied at Kyoto City University of the Arts, where she was taught by Kenkichi Tomimoto (1886-1963), the founder of the university's ceramics department and an influential figure in postwar Japanese ceramics, among others.Other grandmasters from whom she was taught were Kondō Yūzō, Fujimoto Nōdō and Kiyomizu Rokubey VI. Matsuda Yuriko's work is colorful, playful and figurative but always parodying and exaggerating reality, with elements of Dada and Pop Art.  Her works range from ceramic shoes and boots, gold-decorated bottoms and teapots with bananas or eggplants, all colorfully and minituously painted with decorations in red glaze with gold kinrande details, in the style of Imari or Kutani export porcelain. She makes quasi functional objects, and she confuses the viewer accustomed to traditional vases and tea bowls by shaping them as a pair of porcelain feet mounted on wooden blocks. Matsuda Yuriko is a child of her time. Her unconventional work has common ground with, for example, the views of her teacher Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886 - 1963), one of the most important artists who approached ceramics with new eyes during this period and defined ceramics as objets d'art or "the ultimate abstract art form." This foreshadowed those of later avant-garde ceramic art movements, such as the Sōdeisha in the years following World War II. For Matsuda Yuriko, moreover, as a woman she also had to stand up to traditional male ceramic production, and had to go her own way if she did not want to be relegated to the fringes of ceramic production, such as adding decorations and glazes. After World War II, Japanese ceramic work shifted in more sculptural, experimental and expressive directions but it wasn't until the late 1960s and 1970s that there was also an increasing openness toward female ceramicists. Matsuda Yuriko nowadays has an international following. Her work has been exhibited in Italy, France, Belgium, Eastern Europe and Egypt and was included in the 2006-2007 exhibition of contemporary Japanese ceramics of the Japan Society of New York. Examples of her work are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale Art Gallery, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas and the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, as well as in many major museums in Japan.