Tadashi Kawamata is an artist who transforms our environment, he works in the midst of demolition and construction observing and highlighting socio-economic links between architectural construction and destruction. His site specific projects – made from reclaimed materials - have taken place all over the world and range from intimate transformations of a single house or apartment to the whole scale reconfiguration of towns.
Utillizing discarded materials; wooden pallets, crates, corrugated tin and cardboard, Kawamata sets about building new and unconventional structures; a bridge between an apartment block and a museum, a wooden walkway that leads from a town centre to a lakeside, slum dwellings constructed in a picturesque park. Kawamata's aim is to turn these environments inside out, and present the viewers with a completely fresh view of their surroundings, whether it's from a walkway built three metres above the town square or by a room transformed with a suspended ceiling of reclaimed doors. These projects make us question our environment, its destruction/reconstruction, and how we interact with it.
Born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1953, Kawamata lives and works in Japan and Paris, France. He has been a professor at both the Tokyo National University of Arts and Ecole National Superieure des beaux arts, Paris. Annely Juda Fine Art has held three solo exhibitions of his work as well as two unique one-off gallery installations at the current and previous gallery premises in 1997 and 1990. He has had many one-man exhibitions and projects throughout Europe, the United States and Japan including the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Kunsthalle, Recklinghausen, Centre Georges Pompidou Metz, France, Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland, Neue Galerie Staatlische, Kassel, Germany and in Japan inc the Meguro Museum of Art, Hara Museum and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima and Toyota Municipal Musem of Art, Toyota. Exhibitions in the US include Museum of Fine Art, Boston, the McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton and in Canada the National Gallery of Art, Ottowa. Tadashi Kawamata exhibited at the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982, and later was invited to Documenta VIII and Documenta IX and also the Busan Biennale in South Korea.