Established in Kyoto, Japan, in 2013, Eocene Arts is an art gallery specializing in fine Japanese bamboo baskets, 20th century ceramics and bronze, and mingei (folk) arts.  

 

Eocene Arts takes its name from the Eocene epoch, when the Earth was warmer, wetter, and at times covered from pole to pole in forest. In the Eocene the first flowers appeared and so too the first fruits and pollinator insects, and many first mammals. The Eocene, which concluded 30 million years ago, was a time of fecundity and natural transformation from which we might learn much today.

 

Eocene Arts presents objects bearing human knowledge of the shapes and colors that lie within the stones, soils, plants, ash, and waters all around. We consider the objects created as a form of landscape art, expertly crafted and yet brilliantly intuitive and with a coherence uncommon in the world today. In all such works -whether the cave paintings at Lascaux, the great shrine at Ise, or Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm- the maker is present as medium rather than master. It can be said that such things are born, not made, and that they improve through time and in use.

 

Eocene Arts features Japanese art and craft, in which nature's beauty and ephemerality have long been a unifying aesthetic motif. We also seek kindred objects of other peoples and places. We are always interested in an object's historical significance as well as its capacity to reveal. We seek models for the future rather than relics of the past.

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Eocene Arts has contributed to leading galleries of ceramic, bamboo, and lacquer art, to important private collections of works by Kawai Kanjiro and Otagaki Rengetsu, and to esteemed collectors around the world. We periodically exhibit in San Francisco, New York, Paris and Kyoto.

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We invite inquiries regarding present or prospective works. Please contact us to arrange studio visits when in Kyoto.

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Our photographs use only natural light.