VeneKlasen/Werner is presenting the first ever solo presentation in Berlin of Kōji Enokura (1942–1995), one of the most important figures in post-war Japanese art.Comprising more than 20 works spanning the years 1970 – 1992, the exhibition explores the different mediums used by Enokura, such as photography, painting, and installation.Enokura was a founding member of the Tokyo-based Mono-ha (“School of Things”) group which is credited with radically redefining Japanese art during the late 1960s and early 1970s.The Mono-ha group comprised Koji Enokura, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Susumu Koshimizu, Lee Ufan, Katsuhiko Narita, Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Jiro Takamatsu, Noboru Takayama and Katsuro Yoshida.Reacting to the industrialization of Japan and the dominant influence of Western art history, the loose collective of artists rejected traditional Western approaches to painting and sculpture, and instead focused on exploring materials and their properties.Enokura himself was fascinated by the tension between the visceral potency of materials and the contingency of the body, VeneKlasen/Werner states.According to Los Angeles-based gallery Blum & Poe, in his writings Enokura said, “It is the tension between the body and the material that interests me, and that’s what I want to explore. It attests to the consciousness I have of my own existence.”The exhibition at VeneKlasen/Werner showcases the artist’s explorations into the act of staining, which he began in the 1970s by staining paper, cloth, felt, and leather with oil and grease, and continued with his cotton-fabric works of the 1980s and 90s.Another key component of the exhibition is a selection of photographs documenting Enokura’s first mature works – his totally ephemeral spatial and sculptural interventions from the early 70s, which he termed “symptoms.”“Quantity of Intervention,” for instance, documents a work that was part of a show at Tokyo’s Tamura Gallery in 1972 in which a thick mortar wall, constructed directly behind the entire glass-walled entrance of the gallery, appears either to have been ripped open or caving into a spatial vortex.“Kōji Enokura” is at VeneKlasen/Werner in Berlin until March 5, 2016Click the slideshow to see images of the exhibition
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