MOTOHIRO TOMII

Tomii’s profile and reputation have grown significantly in recent years, notably with the exhibitions Motohiro Tomii: Sculptures at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, and Tomii Motohiro: Time to See at the Niigata City Art Museum, both staged in 2023.

Tomii is known for sculptures that take predominantly readymade products, and with minimal modification liberate them from their preordained purpose to create “forms” possessing color and shape, an approach that could be described as deconstructing and reconstructing the act of making.

Featuring sculptures of human heads, and painting-like reliefs, this exhibition represents a new stage in the artist’s creative journey. Tomii says that these works, both the heads—rare figurative images in his practice—and the painting-like paper reliefs, are the product of a personal shift from “making” back to the very foundation of his personal experience of art: the act of “seeing.”

Don’t miss these latest offerings from Motohiro Tomii, born of new horizons forged at the intersection of making, and seeing.

Statement

In my practice I pay particular attention to the act of “seeing.” When it comes to production, obviously the final part is the making, but I can confidently say that for me, seeing is making. When exactly did I adopt this attitude, and where did it come from? To my mind, perhaps from two experiences: time spent gazing at the sea in my hometown from early childhood to adolescence; and clay modelling in sculpture classes at art school.

I say looking at the sea, but at what exactly of the sea, is unclear. The same applies to clay modelling. Taking someone as artist’s model and creating what we call a figurative sculpture may sound simple, but it is not as if there is a sample to copy. With the clay undulating, ever-shifting between us, my eyes start to flicker, my focus fail, leaving me utterly befuddled. The truth is I am disoriented by both ocean and the clay models I work on. I now think it is because though I certainly want to see them, try to do so, plead to, desire to; to focus on them is impossible. Yet for all this people still end up seeing something, and it is with an interest in this aspect of human experience, and in the hope of it, that I continue to make works.

Telling myself that I am “seeing the act of seeing,” I acknowledge the flickering and focus loss from “something” made by someone, and give shape to it. Last year, as I continued to pursue this, it suddenly occurred to me to start making heads. Not human bodies that is, but heads, portraits. I wanted to try placing the source of the experience of “seeing” on the same level as my work to date. Head, face, self, other—it is one of the things we look at the most. I attempted to manifest that as something seen for the first time. Preferably as unidentified object, before its existence as a sculpture (sculpture should be like that anyway).

In this exhibition the heads are positioned as “something that holds it orientation, acting on the space.” In there are inserted some of the reliefs I have been quietly turning out over the past few years. Titled “A room with head statues” these are paintings “made” by me, as someone who cannot paint. Ultimately these became not paintings, but a way to “see” insubstantial spaces.

In the end it all comes down to seeing. For some it might be “hearing” or “smelling,” or even “noticing” but for me, to date it has been about “seeing,” and this is how I interact with the world. The works are like a device that questions whether that interaction is truly necessary, and keeps that inquiry alive.