Narumi Nekpenekpen’s Angels with Dirty Faces

my chipped tooth oozing, 2021, Glazed ceramic, 12” H x 9” W x 6” D

Text by Olivia Whittick

Breaking the mould of what we’ve come to expect from slab porcelain, far from a demure vase or an oat-colored dish, removed from any familiar hand-building process, Narumi Nekpenekpen’s sculptures look like if Bratz dolls had their genes scrambled with your morning coffee mug. Diverting radically within a medium often streamlined and classical, Nekpenekpen’s bisque works appear as heaped-up, patch-worked and Crazy Bones-esque figurines, their Bambi-eyes twinkling with emotion, exploding outwards with pouting lips and clowny platformed boots. Nekpenekpen says the ideas for her work come from the depths of her soul, her sculptures becoming a tangible form of what she feels inside, the dolls representing a diaristic catalogue of the artist’s psychological states. A graffiti-meets-sgraffito technique, mixed with a kawaii-infused form—no doubt fostered by the artist’s childhood years in Kashiwa, Japan—brings a refreshingly playful spontaneity and visceral punk sensibility to the canon of works in clay. Nekpenekpen’s solo show “Angels with Dirty Faces” is on at Harkawik, New York, through November 18th.