Masahisa Fukase was born in the Nakagawa District, Hokkaido, Japan in 1934. He is renowned for his obsessive, intense and deeply introspective photographs with which he attempted to describe his passionate and sometimes violent life. Perhaps the most widely recognized of his projects is his series The Solitude of Ravens (currently on display at the Michael Hoppen Gallery).
We are delighted to be exhibiting at the Armory a radically different series by Fukase titled Hibi. This is the first time that this rare body of work has been exhibited outside of Japan. The series is comprised of street photographs, images of the grooves and cracks in the pavement. Each of the black and white images painstakingly attends to the road’s surface – the worn road-markings, the fading lines and arrows eroded by the city’s innumerable inhabitants, a web of fissures in the asphalt. In February and March 1992, Fukase printed and painted the works for a solo exhibition, ‘My Landscape ‘92’, held at Nikon Salon in Tokyo. He overlaid a set of bromide prints with fluid drawings in brightly coloured inks and on every image the physical presence of the artist is traced, a shadow-presence, which seems to offer a reading, an interpretation but one that can never be fully resolved.
Masahisa Fukase’s Bukubuku is currently on exhibition at Tate Modern in Performing for the Camera. His work has previously been exhibited widely at institutions such as MoMA, New York, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, UK, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His work is held in major collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, SFMoMA, USA, The Metropolitan Museum, of Art, New York, and The Getty Museum, Los Angeles. He is also the winner of prizes such as the 2nd Ina Nobuo Award in 1976 for his exhibition “Karasu” as well as the Special Award at the 8th Higashikawa Photography Awards in 1992.
ARMORY 2016, PIER 92, BOOTH 124
