Word has reached us regarding the passing of stone carver and sculptor Kazutaka Uchida. We wish to offer condolences to his family, students and his many friends in the stone carving community. He was very proud of his many summers spent in the United States in the Pacific Northwest; Marble, Colorado, and Northern New Mexico teaching and working on his own carvings.
He was born and lived in Japan where he first studied sculpture. He received an advanced degree in sculpture from the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1975. He returned to Japan and was commissioned to researched artisan traditions for the Japanese government. His experiences in Nepal greatly affected his art and his life.
Uchida found resonance in clear lines, subtle beauty, harmonious relationships, and the quiet power of elemental forms to evoke the transcendence and a feeling of Zen-like monastic tranquility and peace. The museum director Stephen C. McCough describes Uchida’s sculpture…”It is an art of large and simple gestures which lead the eye through and around the piece and then into the surrounding space. His forms are elegant and refined. They consist primarily of the sphere, the plane, the disk, the straight line and the rectangle.”
Sculptors carve and polish stones, not to make beautiful stones; rather, the forms they make are the result of their search for the limits of their artistic capabilities.
– Kazutaka Uchida
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One reply on “Kazutaka Uchida 1948-2024”
I took a workshop with Uchida in Rinconada, New Mexico and it was a joy and a pleasure. He leaves a great legacy in stone and will be remembered as long as the stone lasts.