Hino Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of the latest works by sculptor Keizo Tawa from Monday, November 11th, 2024.

In May this year, Tawa held a solo exhibition at the newly built space B1Storage in Omotesando, Tokyo. The show was entitled ‘Far Distance,’ and consisted of a selection of old and new works. When Tawa was asked what he meant by the title, he replied with a seemingly elusive answer, that in recent years he has become even more concerned with the notion of the ‘depth of time’ and that he has been unable to stop ‘dreaming of and desiring distant times.’ Keizo Tawa is a sculptor who has been working mainly with iron for nearly 50 years. Although the body of work is described as ‘sculpture,’ his oeuvre is neither created by carving or modelling, but rather by ‘hammering,’ sometimes ‘grinding,’ and by ‘combining’ lumps of iron.

Tawa has often referred to the concepts of substantiality and insubstantiality in relation to iron, which exist inherently as material qualities. He has been searching for a way of being things, or things being (Tawa describes his own work as Mono: a thing in Japanese), and by extension, a way of being himself. A mixture of reality and unreality - somehow imaginary. In terms of the ‘being’ of things, verticality and horizontality, coupled with gravitational force, have always been inseparable matters for the artist and provide motivation to create work.

Tawa states that the new works to be presented this time are the results of his pursuit of ‘formless things’, and his search for a state of ‘just being iron.’ It is as if the atoms were pulled towards each other and stuck together, spinning round and round in zero gravity, until they finally take shape. Tawa himself admits that these works, where welding rods are melted down and gradually joined back together to form lumps, are examples of modelling sculpture, but he would rather see them as simply the results of iron rods sticking together.

Incidentally, in 1978, when Tawa began working with iron, he presented a piece, which was made by repeatedly melting and welding a 20 kg piece of iron wire into a shaped mass for his graduation work at university. Later, looking back on those days, he commented, “after I had left Ehime for Tokyo, everything I saw seemed so shredded that I felt like I couldn't do anything about it, and at that time, I found a used and discarded guard wire on the ground and wanted to put it back to its original form,” and “I wanted to take wire, an industrial product, and return it to a mass through the act of welding.” In a society where reality seems often stranger than fiction, the young artist from a small island in Ehime appears to have superimposed his own way of being on the material of iron. Now, nearly half a century later, Tawa has consciously or unconsciously chosen again to go back to his creative roots.

A curator, who knew the artist well, once described one of Tawa's works as a ‘block of iron that can be regarded as a void or cavity, that has been inserted into the real world.’ This viewpoint sees iron, which radiates a solid presence, as a void and seems to be exactly what Tawa is trying to project through the material: substantiality and insubstantiality, existence and non-existence. It seems that Tawa aims to create a void, a space in which nothing exists, while simultaneously aiming for the state of ‘just being iron,’ and this objective could be described as an act of making the existence of things (including the metaphysical realm) more apparent.

Furthermore, in the presence of space and matter, time reveals itself. The artist's recent fascination with the ‘depth of time’ and ‘dreaming of distant times’ suggests that Tawa is widening his perception beyond time and space, and a nostalgic yearning for cosmic time is emerging. Within this vast expansiveness, the artist will continue to explore things and spaces, relying on the eternal depth of time. The lump of iron could be a surrogate for Tawa himself, you may also be that, and those people you reminisce about could be those masses.

This is the first exhibition for Keizo Tawa at Hino gallery in two years. We hope you will come to see the exhibition and enjoy his most recent works.

Photography: Tadasu Yamamoto


*At the 35th anniversary exhibition ‘SUNOUCH To-ru: The Terminus a Quo for Our Museum’ currently being held at the Kuma Museum of Art Ehime, a public restoration of Keizo Tawa's work ‘Appearance – Level,’ which is installed in the museum's courtyard, will be carried out on November 23rd (Sat) and 24th (Sun) as a commemorative event. Students from the Iyo Agricultural High School will be supporting the restoration together with Tawa. Visitors to the museum can see it from the lobby, so please take this opportunity to visit. We will also open the gallery for Tawa’s exhibition on Saturdays and the public holiday, November 23rd.