Fino al 21 Febbraio la Galleria Blum & Poe di New York presente i lavori di Kishio Suga, in un percorso di memoria storica.
Kishio Suga
New York, January 8 — February 21, 2015
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 8, 6-8pm
Blum & Poe is very pleased to present a concise survey of Kishio
Suga, one of the leading figures of Mono-ha (School of Things), a loose
group of artists that rose to critical prominence during the late 1960s
and early 1970s. This is Suga's second solo exhibition with the gallery
and his first solo presentation in New York.
The Mono-ha artists took natural and industrial materials, such as
stone, glass, metal plates, wood, paper, cotton, wire, rope, and water,
and arranged them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. Suga
articulates his approach to materials as an ongoing investigation of
"situation" and the "activation of existence," focusing as much on the
interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as
on the materials themselves.
The exhibition features several site-specific installations that are
enigmatic manifestations of horizontal and vertical tension, weight, and
gravity. Among them, Fieldology (1974/2015) is a low,
fence-like expanse of rope strung diagonally across a gallery and
partially obscured by a mound of off-cuts. Outside on the terrace, Dispersed Spaces
(2015) consists of seven concrete vessels from which seven
twenty-foot-tall metal rods rise up and arc down, tethered by the weight
of a rock at each end.
One room is dedicated to Suga’s wall-mounted assemblages, spanning
the early 1970s to 2014. Made of all kinds of materials, these works
reveal the spontaneous and intuitive character of Suga’s practice. The
artist has variously tied, bound, stacked, cut, glued, painted, taped,
wedged, leaned, peeled, nailed, carved, bent, and folded these materials
into their current forms. The exhibition will also include important
works on paper from the mid-1970s.
Kishio Suga was born in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, in 1944, and
currently lives and works in Ito, Shizuoka Prefecture. He received a BFA
in oil painting at Tama Art University, Tokyo, in 1968. Since then, he
has had numerous solo exhibitions in Japan, including at the Yokohama
Museum of Art and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. This
exhibition at Blum & Poe coincides with major solo shows at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and the Vangi Sculpture Garden
Museum, Shizuoka, Japan. Suga’s work has also been included in landmark
surveys, such as Prima Materia, Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy, 2013; Parallel Views: Italian and Japanese Art from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, The Warehouse, Dallas, Texas, 2013; Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012; Reconsidering Mono-ha, National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2005; Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, held at Yokohama Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994; Japon des Avant Gardes 1910–1970, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1986; and the 8e Biennale de Paris. 1973.
