Before Jun Kaneko was a sculptor, he was a painter, and that instinct still runs through everything he makes. This exhibition brings together two distinct bodies of work: flat, gestural slabs that function almost like canvases, where glaze, fire, and chance move like pigment finding its own path across a surface; and his raku heads, larger-than-life forms that carry the same painterly mark-making into three dimensions.

Kaneko’s relationship with Raku began by accident. Soon after arriving in the U.S. in 1963, a short visit to ceramicist Paul Soldner’s studio at Scripps College stretched into a week of working alongside him—Kaneko’s first real encounter with clay. Raku appealed to him because it refuses to sit still: rather than following a fixed schedule, it asks the artist to read the kiln in real time, judging color, heat, and timing moment to moment.

The works in this gallery also reflect Kaneko’s later, more audacious chapter with the technique: a push to scale raku beyond its traditionally intimate size, testing how much of the process’s spontaneity could survive at a larger, more commanding scale. Whether stretched flat across a slab or built up into a larger-than-life head, the result is a body of work that is at once bold and instinctive, built on heat, risk, and a willingness to let the kiln surprise you.

Jun Kaneko: Raku is on view July 10 through August 30.