TARO NASU is pleased to announce Ryoji Ikeda’s solo exhibition entitled “data.gram”.
Ryoji Ikeda
Born in Gifu in 1966. Currently lives and works in Paris and Kyoto.
2014 Prix Ars Electronica Collide@CERN Artists Residency Award, 2012 Ars Electronica Digital music, Golden Nica Award, 2003 Nominated for World Technology Award.
Recent solo exhibitions include “Okayama Art Summit 2022” Okayama Castle, Okayama, “Ryoji Ikeda” Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Aomori (2022), “Ryoji Ikeda” 180 The Strand, London (2021), “data-verse” Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (2020), “Ryoji Ikeda Solo Exhibition” Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2019), “Ryoji Ikeda | continuum” Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018), “supersymmetry” KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn (2016), “micro | macro”ZKM, Karlsruhe (2015), “supersymmetry” Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi (2014), “+/- [the infinite between 0 and 1” Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2009), and international exhibitions include “58th Venice Biennale” Venice (2019), “Wiener Festwochen 2018” Vienna Festival, Vienna (2018), “Dojima River Biennale” Dojima River Forum, Osaka(2015), “Aichi Triennale” Aichi (2010).
Ryoji Ikeda has recently garnered international attention for his large-scale solo exhibition in the summer of 2022 at the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. The artist, whose specialty is to present the integrative composition of auditory and visual images in grand scale, here shows, in a brand-new sense of scale, a pluralistic microcosm of new works depicting the world surrounding human beings.
Ikeda dominates and expands the sensory and cognitive scopes of viewers with light and sound. His approach brings a fresh system of perception and a broadened perspective to the spectators’ world concept, provoking their thought to leap into the infinite universe. The viewing experience stands on an overwhelming sense of presence with a mathematical sublimity; it is realized by the artist’s depersonalized accumulation of objective information and precise mathematical calculations. It is a view of the universe that only Ikeda can express. At the same time, it is universal, understandable not merely for human beings but for all the other intelligent life in the cosmos. His creation epitomizes what communication of the expected future would be. Ikeda composes pieces of information, sometimes in layers and sometimes in parallel, converging them into a single image to be projected on large screens. His new works dismantle and analyze each of these data once again. The results are captured and culminated as individual pieces of art. We can regard it as the artist’s reconstruction and reinterpretation of his own work, as well as his praise of diversity and the elaborate completeness of the microcosms contained within the enormous macrocosm.
This solo exhibition is to showcase thirteen new videos evolved from the data-verse series, which uses the motifs of quantum physics, genetic information, and the universe. Ikeda is currently exhibiting the huge LED display works at the Okayama Art Summit 2022, a large-scale international art festival, until November 27, 2022 at the venues including Okayama Castle. It makes this solo presentation held in the gallery a rare opportunity for viewers to appreciate the appeal of Ikeda’s small sized works for their quality—contrastive yet equal to the massive power of his larger screen installations.
