Tadashi Kawamata (born 1953, Hokkaido, Japan) is a contemporary artist renowned for his sculptural installations. Often constructed from everyday materials such as wooden pallets, construction planks, metal, and cardboard, his work subtly and playfully explores the relationship between socio-economic conditions and architectural forms. After first studying oil painting at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Kawamata soon moved beyond the canvas, turning to wood, found materials, and site-responsive forms of construction. Over four decades, his works have addressed questions of urban impermanence, ecological vulnerability, and the complex relationship between human civilisation and the natural world.
Bringing together several series, the exhibition traces Kawamata’s ongoing interest in the meeting point between human-made structures and the natural world. Rendered in his characteristic palette of warm ochres, deep blacks, and teal, the works are assembled from a modest and familiar material — wood — whose changing nature is central to his practice. Moving between architecture, habitat, and landscape, they invite viewers to pause and consider how structures take shape, inhabit a site, and gradually become part of their surroundings.
Works from the Landscape series depict rolling terrain through painted surfaces overlaid with accumulations of wooden fragments. Hundreds of small pieces protrude from the surface, activating the panel as both image and relief — transforming it into what Kawamata has described as a “landscape-archive”: a layered reading of the long and fraught history of interactions between humans and their environment. In the Dam Project Plan series, this engagement comes into focus through the motif of the dam. Luminous pools of teal-painted water are surrounded by accumulations of wooden planks, suggesting structures in formation, under pressure, or in transition. In Kawamata’s hands, the dam becomes a means of considering how human intervention redirects natural forces and alters the landscape.
Under Construction, a three-metre-long panel, extends this sense of formation across a broader horizontal field. Painted architectural forms are crossed by a dense, restless accumulation of wooden fragments, as if a structure were still in the process of emerging, shifting, or being repaired. The work holds together several of Kawamata’s central concerns: the unfinished nature of construction, the fragility of built environments, and the way modest materials can transform an image into something spatial, provisional, and alive.
The sculptures in the exhibition unfold between floor and ceiling. Works such as Nest with Tree and Tree Hut at Mons stand as freestanding vertical forms: natural tree trunks and branches support small angular platforms constructed from cut lumber — rudimentary shelters that read simultaneously as nests, huts, and perches. Installed in the corners of the gallery, the Corner Piece sculptures extend this vocabulary into the architecture of the room itself. Their dense accumulations of wood occupy the meeting point between wall and ceiling, transforming overlooked spaces into provisional structures that seem to hover between nest, shelter, and architectural growth. These works also carry a distinct social dimension: attached to trees, buildings, or the corners of interior spaces, they draw attention to questions of housing precarity, belonging, and the right to space in the contemporary city.
Tree Hut Plan and Tree Hut in Tremblay carry this thinking onto the surface of the panel. On large plywood grounds, Kawamata paints atmospheric forests—trees rendered as dark, gestural forms — from which small wooden treehouse structures protrude physically. These miniature huts cling to the painted trunks with the same precarious determination seen in the sculptures: human constructions embedded in, and wholly dependent upon, the natural structures that sustain them. Across all series, the plywood panel itself functions as both support and subject — its grain visible, its materiality unmasked — insisting that art, like shelter, is made from the world as it is found.
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Tadashi Kawamata lives and works between Japan and Paris. He has taught at both the Tokyo University of the Arts and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His work has been presented at major institutions including the Serpentine Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou-Metz; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Recklinghausen; Kunsthaus Zug; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, among others. Kawamata represented Japan at the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982, and participated in Documenta VIII and Documenta IX in Kassel, as well as the Busan Biennale.
