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Open

EXHIBITION

Collection Exhibition Adventure in “Seeing”

2018.1.27 (Sat.) -
2018.6.24 (Sun.)

Information

Period :
2018.1.27 (Sat.) - 2018.6.24 (Sun.)
10:00 - 18:00 (until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays)
Venue :
Galleries / 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Galleries 1-6
Closed:
Mondays (Open on Feb 12, Ape 30), and Feb 13 (Tue.)
Admission:
Adult: ¥360 (¥280)
University: ¥280 (¥220)
Elem/ JH/ HS: Free
65 and over: ¥280
*( ) indicate group rates (20 or more).
For More Information:
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Phone: +81-76-220-2800
Facsimile: +81-76-220-2802
E-Mail: info@kanazawa21.jp

About the Exhibition

Seeing is something most of us take for granted. Yet, to consciously see is surprisingly difficult, and as a result, we tend to miss much of what there is to see.
An art museum is a place for “seeing,” “admiring,” and “thinking about” artworks. To the visitors to this exhibition, whether they normally enjoy viewing artworks or find it difficult, we would like to say, “First of all, begin by seeing well.” The exhibition “Adventures in ‘Seeing’” starts there.
Open yourself to the artwork a little more than usual. Stand and view it 10 seconds longer than usual. After viewing it thoroughly, relax and view it a little more. Doing so, you will begin to see details you had not noticed, and your imagination will have time to come into play. Discoveries, surprises, and new feelings will come to you in an experience really no different from an adventure story.
Please look actively at the artworks and unfold your very own adventure story.
(YAMASHITA Juri, exhibition curator)

Exhibit composition Featured Artist

This exhibition displays artworks that use different colors, shapes, media, and expressive methods. Many are highly abstract and invite different ways of looking at them. A keyword “hint” is posted in each gallery to aid viewers in actively seeing the artworks.

Gaze intently. Make discoveries

bacteria sign (circle) 2000
earth, dead leaves, acrylic on wooden panel
H45xW45xD0.9cm
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© SUZUKI Hiraku photo: SAIKI Taku

SUZUKI Hiraku

Born in Miyagi, Japan in 1978. Lives and works in Kanagawa. While working in diverse media, including two-dimensional work, sculpture, installation, live drawing, and video, Suzuki Hiraku uniformly explores “writing” and “drawing.” Discovering forms of all kinds—signage and words along roads, natural plants, artificial concrete fragments—he collects them, breaks them down, and reconstructs them in new lines and shapes. Suzuki also freely traverses genres, such as in collaborations with musicians and fashion designers.

Squat and look. Look from one side

L'Origine du monde 2004
longer diameter of oval: 700cm
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© Anish Kapoor

Anish KAPOOR

Born in Mumbai, India in 1954. Lives and works in London, UK. After spending his childhood in India, Anish Kapoor went to England at the age of 17. From the late 1970’s he began to exhibit his work. At the beginning he produced many sculptures covered with pigments on the surface. Later, these pigment works began to reveal openings, this lead on to works which look like cave entrances, or a crack in the earth, covering the inside of a crevice or hole made in the bedrock-like floor with pigments. His works constructed with varied materials always urge us to reconsider our vision and usual perceptions. In the unknown world generated beyond dimensions, Kapoor’s own views on human existence and life are reflected.

Approach closely. Step way back

Work 1963
acrylic on canvas H212.2×W136.4cm collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© YAMAZAKI Tsuruko
photo: SAIKI Taku

YAMAZAKI Tsuruko

Born in Ashiya, Hyogo, Japan in 1925. Lives and works there. Yamazaki Tsuruko was a founding member of the Gutai Group, which was formed in 1954. She later participated in the establishment of the Artist Union and has taken part in solo and group exhibitions where she has presented a range of works including three-dimensional pieces made using sheets of tin, performances, and paintings. Throughout her decades- long career, Yamazaki has produced work on the themes of real and virtual images and sight/cognition/recreation that expresses her unique outlook on the relationship between the individual and the world. The Gutai Group’s avant-garde theory of art, epitomized by leader YOSHIHARA Jiro’s dictum, “create what no one has ever done before,” continued to have a major influence on Yamazaki’s subsequent artistic activities.

Amarante, from series Les Éclats 2004
pigments, pastels and binder on linen
H250 x W250cm
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© Monique FRYDMAN photo: SAIKI Taku

Monique FRYDMAN

Born in Nages, Tarn, France in 1943. Lives and works in Paris and Senantes.
Monique Frydman, who is recognized as one of France’s foremost women artists, became a practicing artist in the late 1970s. Focusing on painting as her primary medium, she explores color and light using such materials as canvas, pigments, pastels, cord, and paper. Her colors and images, emergent from an intimate, bilateral dialogue between her materials and own body, manifest fragments of memory and relics from her distant past – sometimes without her realizing it, and stir our own emotions and memory. In recent years, she has also undertaken site-specific installations using glass, plexiglass, paper, and cloth.

Follow it with your eyes. Try closing them

setting the butterfly free 2015
HD video, paper, watercolor pigment dimensions varable
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© KOGANEZAWA Takehito

KOGANEZAWA Takehito

Born 1974 in Tokyo (Japan), based in Hiroshima Prefecture. Koganezawa Takehito participated in the activities of Studio Shokudo while studying imaging arts and sciences at Musashino Art University and presented a video artwork at a group exhibition held in Yokohama in 1997. Soon after graduating he moved to Germany where he continued to live and work until early 2017. His work, which is centered on video but also encompasses performances, drawings and installations, has been shown widely both in Japan and overseas. It has won high acclaim for its keen insights into the subtleties of everyday life and the glimpses it offers of the mystery, unease, beauty, and humor that lie hidden beneath its surface.

See it from all sides. Sense its movement

Glass No.4 H 1998
glass H83xW83xD77cm
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© KADONAGA Kazuo
photo: NAKAMICHI Atsushi / Nacása & Partners

KADONAGA Kazuo

Born in Tsurugi (now Hakusan), Ishikawa, Japan in 1946. Lives and works in Kanazawa, Ishikawa.
Originally aspiring to be a painter, Kadonaga Kazuo began creating wood sculptures in the early 1970s in response to the influences of 1960s minimal art and conceptual art. He thereafter developed his own production style. This typically involved thinly slicing a log or squared timber,drying the slices, and reassembling them in their original form or, in another case, stacking wet sheets of washi paper, compressing and drying them, then partly peeling back each sheet. In such works, he has sought to eliminate artificial fabrication, as much as possible, and display the material’s inherent qualities and the process generating the artwork. This creative approach he has uniformly applied in the use of bamboo, glass, silk (silkworms), and other media.

One Way or Another 2001
marble H247×W90×D90cm
collection: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© Tony CRAGG
photo: NAKAMICHI Atsushi / Nacása & Partners

Tony CRAGG

Born in Liverpool, UK in 1949. Lives and works in Wuppertal, Germany.
Tony Cragg consistently keeps making works that reflect his insight into objects and the relationship between them. His approach is to examine the shape and function of a wide range of objects from the manmade to the natural world, and to reveal their deep connections. The arrangement of objects expresses a sense of organisms, in which a part becomes the whole and the whole becomes a part. He also pays attention to fluctuations in the usefulness and exchange value of objects according to their functions. In recent years, he has made many solid sculptures focusing on analyzing organic life forms.

Foldable. Unfoldable

Lygia CLARK

Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1920. Died in Rio de Janeiro in 1988.
From 1950 to ’51, Lygia Clark lived in Paris, where she studied under Árpád SZENÈS. She thereafter returned to Brazil where “Concretism,” a movement valuing rational geometric abstraction, was in full flower. Working from a foundation in Concrete Art, Clark along with Hélio OITICICA and Lygia PAPE founded the “Neo-Concretism” movement seeking a revival of subjectivity and expressiveness in abstract creation. Her “Creature” series of works, which take viewers into interaction as participants, are representative of this period. In time, however, her interest moved to art as an experience within the body. In this context, she created pieces that experiment with viewers’ sensory perceptions, eventually arriving at works inverting the border between self and the outside in the manner of a Möbius strip or clothing turned inside out. Clark came to be recognized as one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary artists and won the sculpture prize at the 1961 São Paulo Biennial for her “Creature” series.

Walk around looking. Stand and look

Lehmbruck 2000
wood, metal, aluminum foil, postcard
H320xW20xD18cm
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© Isa GENZKEN
photo: NAKAMICHI Atsushi / Nacása & Partners

Isa GENZKEN

Born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany in 1948. Lives and works in Berlin.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Genzken became known for her large-scale floor sculptures. Later she began to produce works using many different media, including oil painting, photography and film. She continues to produce pieces that place two opposing concepts on a single platform: roughness and delicacy, openness and closure, transparency and opaqueness, and so on. Genzken is an artist who juxtaposes careful calculations and unpredictability, and tries to make the two properly balanced.

Rotating Pyramid II 2007
mirror, technical apparatus
H200×W200×D110cm
collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
© Jeppe HEIN
courtesy: Johann König, Berlin, 303 Gallery, New York, and SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo
photo: KIOKU Keizo

Jeppe HEIN

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1974. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Copenhagen. Jeppe Hein produces sculptural pieces bringing together simple geometric shapes such as circles and squares in white or other non-colors, as well as mirrors and transparent materials in a way that is initially evocative of a 1960s minimalism. Yet Hein’s works conceal playful, humorous elements, sometimes beginning to move in response to the viewer, or offering other hidden surprises. These delightful pranks do away with any of the sense of tension toward the works on the part of their audience, and often aim at provoking communication between viewers. Hein also undertakes permanent works of public art, such as a fountain established in the gardens at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and altered benches installed in Copenhagen’s Kastrup.

Organizers

Organized by:
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation)