Mendes Wood DM São Paulo is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of the seminal Japanese artist Kishio Suga at Casa Iramaia. As one of the pivotal figures in post-war Japan, Suga has spent more than five decades creating works that feature arrangements of natural and industrial elements such as rocks, branches, metal, and paper, aiming to unveil things as they are, granting the artist rhythmic freedom and compositional liberty over these elements.

Suga's artistic practice started in 1968, when he began crafting ephemeral installations using natural and industrial materials like wood, metal, wire, and concrete. Swiftly garnering acclaim for his creations and writings on conceptualism, Suga introduced a discordant yet defined structure of raw materials into gallery spaces, seeking to uncover the reality of "mono" (things/materials) and the "jōkyō" (situation) that binds them together. Through these installations and influential essays, Suga emerged as a pivotal theorist within a loose coalition of like-minded artists, later recognized as Mono-ha (School of Things). Although fleeting, this movement marked a significant milestone in post-war Japanese art history, echoing the development of Land Art, Arte Povera, and Supports/Surfaces in the United States and Europe, while remaining rooted in a distinctively Japanese intellectual and cultural milieu.

Featuring predominantly wall works, the exhibition lays bare the artist's interpretation of boundaries and positions. The geometric notions in Suga's work unveil a primordial essentiality in his compositional intentions. Suga explores states of concurrency and situations shaped by their construction, arrangement, and visibility. By eschewing complex production methods and manufacturing intricacies, he encourages discourse about things in their unadorned state, transforming the essence of the artwork by disengaging materials from their customary contexts.

Press release courtesy Mendes Wood DM.