NYAB Event - Kishio Suga Exhibition

Kishio Suga Exhibition

Blum & Poe

This event has ended.

Blum & Poe presents a concise survey of Kishio Suga, one of the leading figures of Mono-ha (School of Things), a loose group of artists that rose to critical prominence during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is Suga’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and his first solo presentation in New York.

The Mono-ha artists took natural and industrial materials, such as stone, glass, metal plates, wood, paper, cotton, wire, rope, and water, and arranged them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. Suga articulates his approach to materials as an ongoing investigation of “situation” and the “activation of existence,” focusing as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves.

The exhibition features several site-specific installations that are enigmatic manifestations of horizontal and vertical tension, weight, and gravity. Among them, Fieldology (1974/2015) is a low, fence-like expanse of rope strung diagonally across a gallery and partially obscured by a mound of off-cuts. Outside on the terrace, Dispersed Spaces (2015) consists of seven concrete vessels from which seven twenty-foot-tall metal rods rise up and arc down, tethered by the weight of a rock at each end.

One room is dedicated to Suga’s wall-mounted assemblages, spanning the early 1970s to 2014. Made of all kinds of materials, these works reveal the spontaneous and intuitive character of Suga’s practice. The artist has variously tied, bound, stacked, cut, glued, painted, taped, wedged, leaned, peeled, nailed, carved, bent, and folded these materials into their current forms. The exhibition will also include important works on paper from the mid-1970s.