
Yumiko Chiba Associates is proud to present an exhibition of work by Norio Imai. Born in Osaka in 1946, at the age of nineteen Imai joined the Gutai Art Association, and remained an active member right up until the group disbanded in 1972.
This exhibition attempts to reconstruct, half a century on, the installation Limited Space unveiled by Imai in 1971. Consisting of an oversize carpet laid on the gallery floor, Limited Space is a work that spectators can actually enter and experience for themselves.
Also on display at SQUARE will be the photographic work SQUARE−glass/grass (1970), for which Imai laid a square-meter piece of clear glass on grass, and photographed the resulting phenomenological changes.
Both Limited Space with its carpet filling the gallery space, and SQUARE−glass/grass, capturing the changes that occur when a sheet of glass is placed on grass, are minimally manipulative attempts to make critical interventions in the world we take for granted, and in the very system by which works of art are exhibited, and in this sense, Imai’s practice could also be described as connected to the global conceptualism and critiquing of art systems and institutions that emerged in the early 1970s. Don’t miss the opportunity to catch this exhibition by an artist just as active and innovative today as he was in the early ‘70s.






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