Slab Sculpture

1990

Morino Taimei makes vessels and sculptures with strong silhouettes and colorful surfaces. For much of his career, Morino has experimented with the vertical slab form, piercing it and decorating it with novel textures and bright colors. The monolithic quality of this slab is lightened by the window with its playfully painted loops and by the black shapes that seem to take bites out of the sides. The artist has compared the size and shape of these pieces to the tabletop pictorial screens that were once displayed on the desks of scholars in East Asia.