Izumi Kato’s haunting humanoids turn heads in New York
- Wallpaper*
- Mar 14, 2021
- 2 min read
By Pei-Ru Keh
The haunting, mysterious imagery with which the Japanese artist Izumi Kato has made a name for himself is as otherworldly as it is subject to interpretation. Following a successful show at Perrotin gallery in Paris last year, Kato presents a new body of work at the gallery’s New York location this month after a five-year hiatus from the city.
Taking over two floors of the gallery’s historic Lower East Side space, Kato’s latest works range from new mixed-media sculptures and installations to paintings in a variety of scales. The exhibition showcases not only the artist’s significant output in recent years, but also his dexterity across mediums. With works installed in vignettes around the gallery space, either as a cluster of spirits or as stoic, sphinx-like beings, the show culminates in an assemblage of fabric and soft vinyl sculptures that are suspended through the building’s three-storey stairwell.
The self-titled exhibition casts Kato’s ghostly, humanistic figures in an unadulterated fashion. Embryonic in form, and configured with hollow eyes, reduced limbs and bulbous heads, the way each figure is positioned – be it painted on soft textiles or constructed as an arrangement of stones, quietly gazing forward – conveys an omnipotent aura that invites viewers to contemplate another realm. Mirroring the belief in animism as it stems from Shinto tradition, Kato’s paintings and sculptures appear almost as vessels that serve to house spirits from another world. Whether made from solid wood and stone or fashioned from textiles that are then bound in chains and weighted to the floor, these entities hover eerily between two realms...READ MORE
Cover Image: Izumi Kato, Untitled, 2020. Stone, acrylic, stainless steel. Photography: Kei Okano © 2020 Izumi Kato. Courtesy the artist & Perrotin.
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