Mungo Thomson "Background Materials"
MAKI (Tennoz)
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Mungo Thomson
MAKI Gallery is pleased to announce Background Materials, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson, in coordination with his concurrent exhibition Walking Pictures at Isetan Shinjuku and his collaboration with fashion label sacai.
Thomson’s practice fuses film, sound, sculpture and photography. His work is known for its engagement with cultural signs and analog materials, and repurposing them into immersive, optical and kinetic experiences.
Background Materials takes as its starting point a new series of wallpaper works. These room-filling installations are built from the pages of the books Thomson uses to make his celebrated Time Life video animations. The Time Life videos use how-to guides, reference encyclopedias, and production manuals as their raw material. The walls of MAKI Gallery will be papered with the pages from books on Auguste Rodin, physical fitness manuals, Ikebana instruction, wine and spirits guides and catalogs of candles.
The latest video in Thomson’s Time Life series, Volume 17. Survival Manual, 2025, is a video animation of a jiu-jitsu match taken from a martial arts instruction manual owned by the artist’s son, Emit Thomson-Tribe, 15, a jiu-jitsu practitioner and drummer. Thomson-Tribe also provides the percussion soundtrack. The exhibition at MAKI Gallery will be the video’s world premiere.
Distributed around the spaces of MAKI Gallery are new, unique lenticular prints, also known as Walking Pictures, an optical photographic technology that embeds multiple images into a single artwork that “animates” as the viewer walks past. These works continue Thomson’s interest in making artworks that are both pictorial and structural, using the kinetics of the viewer/artwork encounter to embed time into the static object. The subjects of Thomson’s Walking Pictures include apple varieties, cocktail mixing, fitness workouts, throwing pottery, the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, step-by-step Ikebana assembly and a candle burning down.
Several of Thomson’s iconic TIME mirror works are also on view, and for the first time, studies for these made from vinyl and reflective mylar on paper. Together these works shuffle and remix cultural signs into immersive optical experiences, whether in towering video animations, room-filling wallpaper installations, individually animating lenticular prints or space-and-viewer-reflecting mirror works.
Mungo Thomson has had recent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Aspen Art Museum; and Karma, New York and Los Angeles; and group exhibitions at MUDAM Luxembourg; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Orange County Museum of Art. He has been included in Pacific Standard Time, the Istanbul Biennial, The Whitney Biennial, The Performa Biennial, and the Biennial of the Moving Image. Thomson’s work is held in the public collections of Museo Jumex, México City; FRAC Île-de-France, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Thomson’s work was featured in the 2025 New York Film Festival, and he is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Thomson’s practice fuses film, sound, sculpture and photography. His work is known for its engagement with cultural signs and analog materials, and repurposing them into immersive, optical and kinetic experiences.
Background Materials takes as its starting point a new series of wallpaper works. These room-filling installations are built from the pages of the books Thomson uses to make his celebrated Time Life video animations. The Time Life videos use how-to guides, reference encyclopedias, and production manuals as their raw material. The walls of MAKI Gallery will be papered with the pages from books on Auguste Rodin, physical fitness manuals, Ikebana instruction, wine and spirits guides and catalogs of candles.
The latest video in Thomson’s Time Life series, Volume 17. Survival Manual, 2025, is a video animation of a jiu-jitsu match taken from a martial arts instruction manual owned by the artist’s son, Emit Thomson-Tribe, 15, a jiu-jitsu practitioner and drummer. Thomson-Tribe also provides the percussion soundtrack. The exhibition at MAKI Gallery will be the video’s world premiere.
Distributed around the spaces of MAKI Gallery are new, unique lenticular prints, also known as Walking Pictures, an optical photographic technology that embeds multiple images into a single artwork that “animates” as the viewer walks past. These works continue Thomson’s interest in making artworks that are both pictorial and structural, using the kinetics of the viewer/artwork encounter to embed time into the static object. The subjects of Thomson’s Walking Pictures include apple varieties, cocktail mixing, fitness workouts, throwing pottery, the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, step-by-step Ikebana assembly and a candle burning down.
Several of Thomson’s iconic TIME mirror works are also on view, and for the first time, studies for these made from vinyl and reflective mylar on paper. Together these works shuffle and remix cultural signs into immersive optical experiences, whether in towering video animations, room-filling wallpaper installations, individually animating lenticular prints or space-and-viewer-reflecting mirror works.
Mungo Thomson has had recent solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Aspen Art Museum; and Karma, New York and Los Angeles; and group exhibitions at MUDAM Luxembourg; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Orange County Museum of Art. He has been included in Pacific Standard Time, the Istanbul Biennial, The Whitney Biennial, The Performa Biennial, and the Biennial of the Moving Image. Thomson’s work is held in the public collections of Museo Jumex, México City; FRAC Île-de-France, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Thomson’s work was featured in the 2025 New York Film Festival, and he is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Schedule Now in session | Nov 8 (Sat) 2025-Dec 20 (Sat) 2025 6 days left Opening Hours Information
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| Fee | Free | ||||
| Venue | MAKI (Tennoz) https://www.makigallery.com/  | ||||
| Location | 1F Terrada Art Complex, 1-33-10 Higashi-Shinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 140-0002 | ||||
| Access | 9 minute walk from exit B at Tennozu Isle Station on the Rinkai line, 10 minute walk from the South exit of Tennozu Isle Station on the Tokyo Monorail line, 9 minute walk from the North exit of Shimbamba Station on the Keikyu line. | ||||
| Phone | 03-6810-4850 | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
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