Five Decades

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present ‘Five Decades: Sculpture and Works on Paper: Koji Enokura, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Noboru Takayama’. The exhibition brings together the work of four crucial figures whose early practices are affiliated with the post-war Japanese artistic phenomenon Mono-ha (School of Things). Spanning a period of five decades, the works on display examine the different artistic tendencies that developed out of the lineage of Mono-ha, highlighting overall the importance of this movement in creating a unique Japanese post-modern aesthetic. Mono-ha is the name given to a group of artists working in Japan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These artists are linked by a common desire to create relationships between man and matter, people and things, the industrial and the natural. Working with everyday “things” such as glass, stone, steel, rope, iron, wood, and oil, these artists sought to go beyond the materiality of...