Annely Juda Fine Art has given its galleries over to the Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata. He has planted a wooden staircase in the gallery’s second floor storage which spirals upwards through an access hatch in the ceiling, leading visitors through the third and fourth floor galleries, bringing them to a stop just under the glass skylight that covers the fourth floor gallery, giving a glimpse outside, over the surrounding rooftops.
On the gallery’s third floor the spiral staircase bursts through a large wooden dome. This igloo-like structure occupies two thirds of the gallery and visitors navigate their way around and through this structure. Ramshackle and favela-like, light seeps through the gaps between the slats and wooden planks. Through these gaps visitors can spy Kawamata’s large maquettes and reliefs that hang on the walls of the gallery.
On the fourth floor the spiral staircase leads you onto a platform with a London skyline view and a birds eye view of his most recent maquettes of tree houses and projects for Ghent. Looking though his timber installation is a Tsunami relief, made for a proposed project in Northern Japan, an everlasting and ever evolving project that will emerge from the Tohoku tsunami.
Tadashi Kawamata is an artist who transforms our environment, he works in the midst of demolition and construction. Usually using scrap or reclaimed materials, mostly wood, Kawamata sets about building new and unusual 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.
Born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1953, this is Tadashi Kawamata’s fourth exhibition with Annely Juda Fine Art. He has had many one-man exhibitions and projects throughout Europe, the United States and Japan including the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Kunsthalle, Recklinghausen and the Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo. Tadashi Kawamata exhibited at the 40th Venice biennale in 1982, and later was invited to Documenta VIII and Documenta IX.
