ARTCOURT Gallery is pleased to present Open Room, a solo exhibition of works by Satoshi Kawata.

Through installations that revolve around the “mural”, artist Satoshi Kawata presents the relationships between the visual arts and urban spaces. In 2015, Kawata began producing semi-permanent murals by using the classical painting technique of fresco, and his unique method of painting with plaster and pigment on temporary walls that he installs himself, which trace around the actual exhibition space. He has created interventions in public places such as a bathhouse, school, shopping mall, a walking trail in nature, and the entrance, hallway, and stairway landing of an art center. He is working on a new kind of expression through mural-painting that visualizes the overlapping of memories within a contemporary urban space.

These murals, which are typically supposed to remain in the space (building) that they belong to, are only presented in the fixed period of time of the exhibition, and then removed. As he continued contradicting the permanence of the mural, Kawata, who “felt that it became necessary to imagine a new form for the work after its removal,”[*1] took a two month long artist residency in January last year in Chojamachi (Nagoya) as an opportunity for himself to plan an update to the “mural”. After exhibiting the work NO SIDE, produced in a mixed use building that was already planned to be destroyed, he dismantled it and transported the pieces to a different place, and re-exhibited them as the work, Sudden Death. As a result, Kawata “realized that various elements (records of the building’s space) had been added to this dismantled work, so it became a different work from what it used to be,”[*2] and he discovered the next development in his style.

Currently in his artistic practice, Kawata is dealing with the possible mobility of murals and their autonomy from the space they belong to. In this exhibition, with the theme of deconstructing the walls, he will take fresco painting off the wall and present an installation composed of cloth and a temporary wall structure in the form of a prototype. Here, “Open Room” refers to an exhibition or study in a white cube or studio that lacks the distinct characteristics of a place. It can be considered a simulation space for the artist to reconsider all of the elements of an artwork necessary for expression as equal, and to think about the relationship between urban space and artwork with others. On the opening day, we will be holding a talk with curator Hiroyuki Hattori to investigate what exactly mural-making means to Kawata.

(*1) Satoshi Kawata, “January ‘Goes’, February ‘Flees’, March ‘Leaves’ and Reflecting from There”, Art Lab Aichi Artist in Residence “city and synergism” Catalogue, Art Lab Aichi, Mar. 2018, p. 13. (*2) Satoshi Kawata, “On Murals”, Architecture and Society, issue no. 1149, The Architectural Association of Japan, Dec. 2017, p. 5