ART CITIES:Paris-Tadashi Kawamata

Based in Tokyo and Paris, Tadashi Kawamata creates site-specific works all over the world. His favourite material is wood, and he uses beams and boards in installations that change our perception and experience of the sites he chooses. His works often take the form of structures, footbridges and overhead walkways that seem to spring out of their setting and demand to be used.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie camel mennour Archive

Tadashi Kawamata pushes the boundaries between art, architecture and nature, his works have a unique power to appeal to the spectator in many ways.  At first his works appear chaotic, haphazard, organic and out of place in a highly-planned environment or against the backdrop of classic architectural forms and masonry materials, but they are surprising and peculiar and at the same time we all recognize our childhood fantasies of secret hiding places and adventurous dream worlds. Tadashi Kawamata in his solo exhibition “Nest” transforms the Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris, the artist disorients the space by constructing an immense nest the structure of which incorporates the three exhibition rooms and extends into the courtyard.  His site-specific work is made of more than a hundred thousand interlaced wooden chopsticks, is an invitation to reconsider the space as if it was inhabited by a parasitic, precarious, and fragile body. Three other small nests, made of wooden slats or chopsticks, echo the larger one and arelodged in the inside and outside of the gallery. Kawamata engages in an intense dialogue with the environment, of which his work truly becomes a part.  As the artist says “The creative process always begins after I’ve seen the exhibition space”.  Moreover he consistently applies an extremely organic and improvisational work-in-progress method in which he Works closely with students from art schools and local technicians. Also the initial sketches are unfailingly modified by the comments and ideas of the ephemeral community of builders Kawamata engages in the process of each of his creations. The teamwork and the use of found or used material are part of the organic process in which the work grown naturally.

Info: Galerie camel mennour, 47 rue Saint-André des arts, Paris, Duration: 13/12/17 -27/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com