Lot 10: KISHIO SUGA B. 1944 Inside and Out of Lattice 1990 signed and dated 199

KISHIO SUGA B. 1944 Inside and Out of Lattice 1990 signed and dated 1990 oil paint and wood panels 149 x 133 x 8cm (58 11/16 x 52 3/8 x 3 1/8in).

Provenance Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo Acquired directly from above in 1990 by the present owner Private Collection, Japan 1990 :Kishio Suga 1990 2009 25 ‘Mono-ha’ describes a group of Japanese artists active from 1968 to 1975 that aimed to challenge the traditional concepts of what an artist created, and what is considered ‘art’. The name translates to School of Things . The movement was born in a tumultuous socio-political post-war climate that spawned many artists’ movements in Japan and internationally, such as Arte Povera in Italy and Land Art in United States. Similar to the mainstream avant-garde art movements of the time, they discussed how to transcend Western Modernism. However, contrary to the mainstream anti-art tendencies of avant-garde art, Mono-ha attempted to reconfigure art through the reduction of objects to their primary form. Reeling from the horrors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these artists naturally rejected man-made forms, feeling that they led inevitably towards conflict and destruction. They shared a goal to accentuate what is intrinsically beautiful and artistic in raw materials by bringing together natural and industrial objects in their unaltered state, allowing dynamic combinations of materials to speak for themselves. Mono-ha’s leading members included Lee U-fan, Nobuo Sekine, Koji Enokura, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Shingo Honda, Susumu Koshimizu, Katsuhiko Narita, Kishio Suga, Noboru Takayama, Katsuro Yoshida, and Jiro Takamatsu. They began as a circle of friends from Tama Art University, and with regular meetings and passionate debates, they formed the fundamental ideologies of their movement. To them, each object had significance for artistic expression just by the nature of its being. The artists explored the materials’ interdependent relationships with each other, the space they occupied, and the negative spaces. Both the physicality and immaterial qualities were remarkable to the Mono-ha artists. As the movement gained international recognition, the artists associated with Mono-ha became some of the most respected artists of the 20th Century. The artists were prolific during the late 60s and early 70s, putting together numerous site specific works and happenings. After the Mono-ha period ended, artists remained dedicated to the values while they began to be more receptive to additional elements such as colours, and acknowledging the legitimacy of including painting and sculptural works in their expression. In this auction, we present Post-Mono-ha works by two of the core artists that participated in the movement: Kishio Suga (Lot 10) and Susumu Koshimizu (Lot 11). Both of the works reflect the spirit of Mono-ha artists as they progress and evolve through the decades. As a leading member of Mono-ha, Kishio Suga’s oeuvre is characterized by his aim to redefine and reflect upon everyday materials, thereby bringing previously unrecognized facet to light. Suga sought to master the qualities inherent to but not visible in an object, expressed by the intangible experience of being in the same space as the ‘thing’. Material becomes form in his 1990 masterpiece Inside and Out of Lattice (Lot 10); Suga uses easily commonplace wood panels and assembles them as a frame for space. The assemblage becomes not just the thing itself, but the empty spaces that it displaces and defines. The work is created with 30 auburn wooden panels affixed on a square wooden frame, with black paint appear as if oozing out from the centre, and raw wooden textures left exposed on the exterior edges. This allowed the audience to ‘see unseeable things’ – a notion Mono-ha artists was a strong proponent of. The experience not only highlights the physical qualities in each medium, but also to guide the audience to contemplate our own situation, and interdependent relationships with materials around us. Coming from the sculpture faculty, Susumu Koshimizu is especially celebrated for creating minimal sculptures and installation pieces from basic materials such as iron, wood and paper. The present lot Queen’s Chair (Lot 11) is an exploration of wood and marble. The throne has to be assembled for each use, and the configuration can be different each time. Both pieces rely on each other to complete the work, as the wooden part would fall over without the base, and the base does not have a large and stable enough surface for sitting. This work encapsulated the symbiotic relationship that captivated the Mono-ha artists. Beyond the physicality, Koshimizu also contemplates the idea of a chair as a tool for sitting. In nature, we could sit on the ground or on a large rock. The ‘chair’ was only devised for social decorum, not out of necessity. As chairs became popularized, the ‘throne’ was then conceived out of a need to satisfy political iconography for monarchs. Queen’s Chair is an impractical chair, as the heavy materials pose mobility issues. This echoes the inflexibility of a monarchic system, an imposed and unnatural social hierarchy disconnected from human nature and human needs. 26 Lee Ufan B. 1936, Relatum - Counterpoint, 2009. Steel, stone. View of the exhibition «Dissonance» at Saint-Laurent-le Capitole Chapel, «Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles» Arles 2013. ,«Relatum-Counterpoint»2009Le Capitole «Dissonance» © ADAGP Lee Ufan. Photo Archives Kamel Mennour. Courtesy the artist and Kamel Mennour Paris/London 28