KENJIRO OKAZAKI: FORM AT NOW AND LATER
Pace presents “Form at Now and Later 形而の而今而後”, an exhibition of work by Kenjiro Okazaki. This presentation will bring together new and recent paintings and sculptures by the Japanese artist
June 28 – August 17, 2024
A celebrated artist and critic, Okazaki’s work spans painting, sculpture, performance, architecture, landscape design, robotics, and other media. He uses these seemingly disparate modes of making collectively to explore the ways that time and space can be reshaped and reconstructed through our unique cognitive experiences of the world around us.
The works included in Form at Now and Later 形而の而今而後 at Pace in Seoul underscore the artist’s increasingly philosophical approach to form and abstraction. In a selection of small-scale paintings from his series Zero Thumbnails— which stem from his experiments with diptych compositions in the 1990s—abstractions seem to extend beyond compact picture plane, with color and form becoming autonomous entities in the exhibition space.
The show will also feature 16 large-scale paintings created by Okazaki in 2023 and 2024. Linking brushstrokes across multiple panels and through mirror-image relationships, these acrylic compositions invite a continually shifting visual experience that eschews any single overall impression or reading. The elaborate titles of these paintings are works of art in and of themselves, offering poetic entry points into each canvas.
Other highlights in the exhibition include the artist’s mixed media wall relief 3:15 (1983–93), the most historic work in the show, and a selection of his new synthetic marble sculptures of distorted, overlapping forms. Okazaki’s process for making these undulating sculptures—which involves mixing soil with various other materials—is in some ways akin to the formation of the Earth through collisions and accumulations.
Kenjiro Okazaki (b. 1955, Tokyo) is an acclaimed artist, architect, and theorist with a multifarious practice that spans painting, sculpture, robotics, costume and set design, and architecture. With a unifying emphasis on form, Okazaki explores themes related to time, space, and the human experience through a postmodernist lens.
Okazaki has authored and co-authored several books, including Renaissance: Condition of Experience (Bunshun Gakugei Library, 2015), and Abstract Art as Impact: The Concrete Genealogy of Abstract Art (Akishobo, 2018), and perhaps most well-known, Abstract Art as Impact: Analysis of Modern Art (Aki Shobō, 2018), for which he was awarded the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts in 2019.