NEW YORK, NY.- Pace announced its representation of Kenjiro Okazaki. A celebrated artist, critic, and theorist, Okazaki’s work spans painting, sculpture, performance, architecture, landscape design, robotics, and other media, investigating time, space, and perception through a language of abstraction. He uses these seemingly disparate modes of making collectively to explore the ways that time and space can be reshaped and reconstructed through our unique cognitive experiences of the world. Okazaki’s first solo exhibition with Pace—which featured new paintings and sculptures—was presented in Seoul this summer, and two new paintings by the artist will figure prominently on the gallery’s booth at Frieze Seoul in September.
Pace will represent Okazaki in tandem with Blum and his existing network of galleries, including Galerie Frank Elbaz, Nantenshi Gallery, and Takuro Someya Contemporary Art.
Samanthe Rubell, President of Pace Gallery, says: “We’re thrilled to welcome Kenjiro Okazaki to Pace. Through our growing activity in Japan—and Kenjiro’s recent projects with our colleagues and friends at Blum—we’ve come to further understand and appreciate the significance and impact of his work in the history of art. We look forward to sharing his wide-ranging work with our audiences around the world.”
Youngjoo Lee, Senior Vice President of Pace Gallery in Seoul, says: “In his practice across mediums and disciplines, Kenjiro Okazaki brings to light new conceptual and intellectual dimensions of abstraction. His recent exhibition at our Seoul gallery—his first-ever solo presentation in Korea— showcased both the vastness and the depth of his work, highlighting the ways he uses art to examine universal questions of perception and experience.”
Born in Tokyo in 1955, Okazaki has developed an expansive, deeply philosophical practice across various mediums and disciplines to examine the relationships between temporality and human perception, citing Filippo Brunelleschi,
Seiichi Shirai, Pontormo, Édouard Manet, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Klee, Kumagai Morikazu, Sakata Kazuo, and John Cage among his influences. The English idealist metaphysician John M. E. McTaggart’s ideas about time’s fragmentary nature, as laid out in his 1908 book The Unreality of Time, also shaped Okazaki’s thinking about his individual artworks as “passages” within a larger framework. In particular, he created his large body of abstract paintings as an open system of images that can be endlessly reconfigured, reorganized, and recontextualized to invite new interpretations.
Since his early diptychs from the 1990s, Okazaki has experimented with generating sequences of gestural forms across multiple canvases, linking brushstrokes through homography. As such, his compositions invite a continually shifting visual experience that eschews any single overall impression or reading. Vibrant and radiant, the artist’s richly textured paintings are built up in mixtures of acrylic paints that, both reflecting and transmitting light, give each canvas a glowing appearance. The lengthy and elaborate titles of his paintings are works of art in and of themselves, offering poetic entry points into each canvas.
With his painted geometric wall reliefs, which he has been producing since the late 1970s, Okazaki meditates on how an artwork can be transformed by architecture and space, and vice versa. In these works, like his abstract paintings, Okazaki plays with ideas of sequence and seriality, riffing on a singular vocabulary of forms through variations in color and physical orientation in a given space.
The artist, who lives and works in Tokyo, presented his first-ever solo show at Muramastu Gallery in the Japanese capital in 1981, and since then he has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at major art institutions in the country. His work was included in the landmark 1994 exhibition Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky, which traveled from the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan to the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, he was selected as the director of the Japanese pavilion for the Venice Biennale’s International Architecture Exhibition.
Okazaki has also authored and co-authored several books, including Renaissance: Condition of Experience (Bunshun Gakugei Library, 2015); his most well-known publication, Abstract Art as Impact: Analysis of Modern Art (Akishobo, 2018), for which he was awarded the Minister of Education Award for Fine Arts in 2019; and Eden of the Senses (Akishobo, 2021), for which he was awarded the 2022 Mainichi Publishing Culture Award.
Today, Okazaki’s work can be found in many public collections throughout Japan, including the National Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo; the National Museum of Art in Osaka; the Ohara Museum of Art in Okayama; and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. He is also represented in the Rachofsky Collection in Dallas, Texas.
