This exhibition marks Maria Taniguchi’s first solo presentation in Japan and will feature new paintings and sculptures. Taniguchi’s works encompass painting, sculpture, video and installation. Her practices investigate space and time along with social and historical contexts. Her series of “Untitled” brick paintings is an ongoing series that was initiated in 2008. All of the paintings consist of seemingly countless rectangular cells, each one outlined by hand with white graphite and filled with gray and black tones. The painstaking process creates a subtle yet complex surface pattern. These paintings are of varying dimensions, most of them measuring meters in size. The constructive nature of the structure embodies architectural elements, resulting in the paintings themselves manifesting as monumental existences within the space. Along with one of her large brick paintings, Taniguchi will present 12 new paintings from the same series, albeit much more compact in scale.
These days, artists are seemingly attracted to the idea of “compression.” This concept is not limited to the compression of tangibles, such as the transformation of hydrogen into metal, but also the compression of intangibles, such as data or time. Our society heavily relies on information technology based on data storage devices consisting of an innumerable accumulation of the binary system, a system that soon will be a thing of the past as we approach mass-scale quantum computing. While the paintings’ simplicity in form could possibly be thought of as something related to minimalism, the paintings also serve to embody a device for storage in the technological sense of the term, and subsequently represent a historical meaning of human development. Taniguchi will also present a group of new sculptures made from Java Plum hardwood native to India and Southeast Asia. These large, architecturally-scaled sculptures depict the letters “I” and “O,” an enigmatic reference to a form of electronic interfacing (input and output). The artist has referred to her brick paintings as the fundamental root of her larger artistic practice, while her other artworks are considered a reflection, or refractions, of it.
An accompanying exhibition catalog will be published in May.
2 minute walk from exit 1b at Roppongi Station on the Hbiya or Toei Oedo line, 8 minute walk from exit 7 at Azabu-juban Station on the Nanboku or Toei Oedo line, 11 minute walk from exit 5 at Nogizaka Station on the Chiyoda line.
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