Akio Makigawa

Akio Makigawa (1948-1999) was a Japanese-born Australian sculptor, installation artist, and printmaker whose work bridged Japanese aesthetic sensibilities with Australian materials and landscape. Born in Karatsu City, Saga Prefecture, Japan, in 1948, he travelled to Perth, Western Australia, in 1974 originally to study sail-making, with the intention of sailing around the world. Through his sailing community he met the Perth sculptor Tony Jones, also a yachtsman, who introduced him to sculpture and steered the direction of his second career.

Makigawa enrolled at Claremont School of Art and continued his formal training at Curtin University, Perth, completing a Bachelor of Arts/Fine Art. He later moved to Melbourne, where he completed a Graduate Diploma in sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts and lived and worked until his death in 1999. He held earlier qualifications from Nihon University, Tokyo. During his life he was successively a gymnast, a yachtsman, a sail-maker, a printmaker, and a sculptor — biographical breadth that informed the precision and balance of the works he produced.

Makigawa's mature sculptural practice used primary natural materials — stone, wood, marble, steel, gold leaf — in compositions described as Zen-like meditations on physicality and spiritual lightness. The critic Jackie Cooper, his cataloguer, characterised Makigawa as having 'written haiku with objects'; the major public commissions in the Melbourne Airport international departure lounge and the Melbourne Town Hall Plaza show this principle at architectural scale. Major solo exhibitions during his lifetime included shows at the School of Art at the Australian National University (1983), the Experimental Art Foundation Adelaide (1986), the Museum and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory (1986), and the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.

Alongside the public sculpture commissions, Makigawa maintained an etching practice, working with the Australian Print Workshop in Melbourne to produce small-edition prints that translate the same sculptural vocabulary — stone, water, memory, recollection — into the intaglio register. His documented etching titles include 'Memory and Spirit' (1998, edition of 40), 'Omoide I' and 'Omoide II' (1998, both editions of 30; 'omoide' translates as 'recollection' or 'memory'), 'Study of Recollections II' (1998, edition of 30), and a Recollections of Memory cycle continuing into 1999. The etchings are hand-pulled on paper at small to medium scale (29 × 23 cm to 56 × 37 cm) and are circulated through Australian secondary-market channels.

His work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Geelong Gallery, and McClelland Gallery, among other major Australian collections, and Smith & Singer set the auction record for a Makigawa sculpture ('Work 1 (Sun)', 1991) at AUD 135,000 in April 2021. The 2014 monograph 'Akio Makigawa: Sculptor' by Jackie Cooper (Melbourne, 2014) is the primary print reference; the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition 'Akio Makigawa: Spirit and Memory' subsequently surveyed his career.