- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Hélène Kelmachter
Kohei Nawa
The Poetry of Bizarre
Many Japanese artists, following in the footsteps of Mariko Mori, explore the boundary between vision and perception, creating delicate, dreamlike worlds.
Kohei Nawa (Osaka, 1975) does so through drawings, sculptures and installations that play with our perception of reality, inventing objects imbued with a strange poetry. By projecting images onto water, coating objects in glass beads, or filling spaces with gigantic molecular forms, Nawa transforms the original state of an image, an object or a space. He transcends banality, turning the ordinary into the exceptional: waste, a cigarette butt, a piece of fruit or a taxidermied animal are metamorphosed into precious and extraordinary objects. Nawa often purchases the most bizarre items online, which he completely covers with transparent glass beads, giving them a new skin. By playing with light, these beads create a magical vibration around the objects, magnifying them.
Moving from the delicacy of beads to sprawling, tentacle-like sculptures, Nawa fills exhibition spaces with polyurethane foam structures that unfold to create monumental environments.
For his exhibition in Espai 13, the artist will create a series of site-specific works.
Exhibition organised in collaboration with SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo.
