Nature's Fruit Bowl
A solo exhibition:
Yuri Iwamoto
April 25 - May 31, 2026
1705 N Kenmore Ave, Los Angeles
Overripe fruit, newly sprung flowers, and beads of water cascading over reflective surfaces—Yuri Iwamoto’s blown glass sculptures transforms everyday imagery into objects of clarity, color, and directness, while holding function in a state of play.
At a moment when contemporary glass is being re-examined as a materially expressive field, Iwamoto’s work stands out for its immediacy and chromatic precision.
Based in Toyama, Japan—a region shaped by centuries of pharmaceutical trade and the industrial glass infrastructure that grew alongside it—Iwamoto works within a lineage of technical rigor that she treats as material rather than tradition. Her sculptures move between vessel and character, object, and figure.
Recalling the illustrated worlds of Moomins, and shaped by Nordic glass traditions, the legacy of Oiva Toikka, and her time at Aalto University in Finland, Iwamoto’s sensibility works through a chromatic logic—color as structure and a lighthearted reframing to create new meaning.
Working through hot sculpting, the glass becomes a real-time register of heat, gesture, and timing. The result is a post-object sensibility: vessels behave less as containers than as expressive forms—objects with character, presence, and immediate emotional legibility.
In footed vessels, Venetian glass references are reactivated rather than quoted— saturated with transparent color, delicately asymmetrical, and charged with formal optimism. That same optimism extends into her mirrored works, where glass elements drift across reflective surfaces, multiplying into subtle constellations that shift with light and movement.
“Yuri Iwamoto merges function and storytelling in a way that feels both comforting and powerful. You’re left with a sense of ease—but as a glassblower, I know that ease is hard-won, shaped through patience, responsiveness, and the pursuit of glass at its most natural. Her work marks an important moment for contemporary glass.”
—Kazuki Takizawa, Los Angeles–based glass artist and founder of KT Glassworks, LLC in West Adams
