Take Ninagawa is pleased to announce the opening of Yuuki Matsumura's second solo show with the gallery, "Almost-Dead Sculpture." The exhibition will comprise an installation of new sculptural works made out of aluminum panels and found materials.
 
A recent graduate of Kyoto City University of Arts, Yuuki Matsumura explores in his practice a form of absurdist minimalism that suggests a contemporary updating of Monoha with a sense of humor. Past works include the series "Boki" (2008-09), referring to the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of an object snapping in two, for which Matsumura used wood bars to painstakingly and exactingly recreate accidentally snapped wood bars that he found in his studio. Similarly, for his previous exhibition at Take Ninagawa in 2009, Matsumura created a set of three identical sculptures in aluminum panel, Untitled, modeled on the caved-in side panel of a smashed car; by recreating and then replicating a chance phenomenon, the artist transformed a unique instance—an act of god—into an infinitely reproducible simulacrum. 

Matsumura's works in "Almost-Dead Sculpture" build upon their predecessors. For the series "Almost-Dead Nude" (2010), Matsumura tore pages out of pornography magazines, enlarged the images and printed them onto large-scale, paper-thin steel panels, which he then manipulated with his hands to look like oversized, crumpled magazine pages. Embodying the psychological volume of sexualized popular media, these works also astutely reflect on the nature of sculptural practice through their distortion of scale and the physical properties of material, as well as their playful approach to the classical nude figure. The scintillating curves of the alluringly posed models peek in and out of the angular folds of the crumpled steel sheets, setting off a tension between image and object, organic and geometric forms and exposed and hidden body parts. 

For Almost-Dead Bucket (2010), Matsumura bought common plastic buckets of four different sizes and then reshaped them to look as if they had been crushed in an accident. However, rather than simply experimenting with random forms, Matsumura folded each bucket so that all three would have the exact same shape at different scales. As with "Boki" and the Untitled car sculptures, Almost-Dead Bucket confounds the conventional distinctions between chance, craft and mechanical reproduction.