Exhibitions

Selection

Dates: February 20, Tuesday–March 30th, Saturday, 2024

• Artists: Erik Swars, Imi Knoebel, Sawako Nasu, Masaharu Sato
• Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 13:00-20:00
• Closed on Sundays, Mondays
• In collaboration with Galerie Jochen Hempel, Kanda & Oliveira

In collaboration with Galerie Jochen Hempel, Kanda & Oliveira, KEN NAKAHASHI will hold a selection exhibition starting from February 20th, Tuesday to March 30th, Saturday, 2024.

Featuring 4 artists from Germany and Japan, Erik Swars, Imi Knoebel, Sawako Nasu, Masaharu Sato. 

Erik Swars, born in Zwenkau, Germany, in 1988, studied painting at O JUN’s lab at the Tokyo University of Arts from 2013 to 2014.

He then went onto attend Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle to study under Jochen Plogsties. 

Swars’ works are held in various public collections, including G2 Hildebrand Collection in Leipzig, the Museum der bildenden Künste in Leipzig.

In 2018, he presented his first installation combining painting, video, sculpture, and photography.

He is interested in the dialogue that is created when individual works are placed next to each other, and in the room itself, which generates contrasts.

Combining materials such as aluminum, steel, wood, pigment, photography, and video, he explores the interconnectedness of time, space, materiality, color, and surface that surround him.

This exhibition features two new works from Postcard series.

Imi Knoebel, born in Dessau, Germany, in 1940, studied under Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Influenced by Russian avant-garde artist Malevich, Knoebel is a pioneer of German abstract art and one of the leading German artists of the postwar period alongside Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo among others. 

Knoebel’s masterpieces include Room 19 (1968), 24 Colors—for Blinky (1977), and the Grace Kelly series.

His works emerge as a mass filled with invisible presence by creating relationships between color, material and shape.  

This iteration showcases 2 edition works from Weiss Schwarz series.

Sawako Nasu, born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1996.

She studied in Masato Kobayashi's lab at Tokyo University of the Arts and received MFA in 2023.

Born and raised in a theatrical family, she cultivated her unique spatial expression through experiences in stage design.

She creates mainly thinly layered oil paintings of landscapes and portraits.

She explores the possibilities of contemporary painting, with the unbridgeable distance between herself living in the present and the art of the past as the foundation.

This exhibition features new paintings based on works by three other artists.

In December, Sawako’s first solo exhibition at KEN NAKAHASHI will be held.

Masaharu Sato, born in Oita, Japan, in 1973.

Sato obtained an M.F.A. in painting at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999.

Later studied in Germany at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and lived 10 years, and returned to Japan in 2010 and re-settled in Ibaraki.

Soon after, he was diagnosed with maxillary cancer.

While fighting this disease, Sato continued to publish works until he died at age 45 in 2019.

He consistently employed rotoscoping with digital pen-tools to trace the landscape within the photographs and videos that he made. 

For Sato, tracing, an act to take in within oneself an object.

Sato also produced two-dimensional photo-digital-paintings characterized by their meticulousness of the surface in live-action while keeping the object at a distance. 

This exhibition includes Stairs, is the last painting in the Dr.Reaper series, a series of two-dimensional works that he continued to produce energetically even after being told that he had little time left to live.

His partner applied the masking, and Sato applied the color over and over with a roller.