This exhibition project that presents Casa Asia at the Hispanic Japanese Cultural Center of the University of Salamanca pays tribute to the Japanese designer and ceramist Mako Artigas.   

The exhibition “MAKO. The Sound of Petals” presents a representative selection of the artist's work: drawings and designs for fabrics, as well as ceramics, enamels and jewelry. The exhibition is completed with a photographic archive and a documentary made for this project by Casa Asia, along with the catalogue. 

Ricard Bru, doctor in Art History and specialist in Japanese art, is the curator of the exhibition, which opens on Thursday, September 19, with the presence of the artist.  

For the curator of the exhibition, “Mako Artigas has developed an extensive and fruitful career around the textile industry, design for prints and, more recently, ceramics and work with enamel. Her view as an esthete draws from many sources and, above all, from a life surrounded by art and artists who, as if it were a forest, have flourished with an infinite number of shapes and colors around them. 

Mako Artigas, profile  

Mako Artigas (Tokyo, 1937) was born in interwar Japan to, after the end of the Second World War, emigrate from his country of origin and integrate into the avant-garde and modern environments of the West. She arrived in Spain in 1960 where she met Joan Gardy Artigas, ceramist and sculptor, with whom she married and had two children. The world of textile design and printing was what Mako Artigas lived and breathed from a very young age, because both families, father and mother, had a centuries-old tradition in the field of the textile industry.   

The artist stood out as a textile designer in Paris in the sixties, seventies and eighties, while periodic stays in Gallifa, starting in the eighties, brought her closer to the world of ceramics. Thus, her textile design gave way and prominence to ceramics with pieces of a more intimate nature, from plates and bowls, to artistic vases and jewelry pieces full of vegetal, natural and colorful references. At 87 years old, Mako Artigas is still active in her workshop in the Catalan municipality of Gallifa.

Press release of the exhibition (DOC)

Text by the curator of the exhibition on Mako Artigas (PDF)