Tokyo Gallery + BTAP is pleased to present “Kishio Suga: Works on Paper,” an exhibition focusing on Kishio Suga’s works on paper.
Kishio Suga is a leading artist of the Mono-ha art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He arranges natural and man-made materials such as wood, metal, stone, concrete, and vinyl in space without altering them, referring to the resulting scenes as “situations” and presenting them as artworks. In particular, his large-scale installations boldly combine different materials to shed light on the relationships between these objects and the spaces that surround them. He held solo exhibitions in 2024 at the He Art Museum (China), and in 2025 at Dia Beacon (New York, USA; scheduled to run for several years) and the Cobra Museum of Modern Art (Netherlands). A major retrospective is also scheduled for spring 2027 at the Cartier Foundation (Paris, France).
This exhibition focuses on Suga’s works on paper. Although two-dimensional, Suga’s paper works have always entailed a certain three-dimensional quality. Throughout his career, he has continued to explore how various types of paper including corrugated cardboard, packing paper, and sandpaper can be manipulated using a wide range of media such as pencils, pens, chalk, paint, and carbon paper. By repeatedly subjecting this paper to a diverse range of processes — cutting, pasting, layering, separating, and joining — Suga causes the materiality of the paper to organize the space that surrounds it, bringing human consciousness to the surface.
Distinct from drawings that depict emotions or images, in these works Suga is fundamentally engaged in highlighting the multilayered nature of the plane while transforming spatiality into a kind of materiality, a process that constitutes the core of his works on paper. The exhibition will feature a mix of works spanning from the 1970s to 2012, showcasing a diversity of techniques and a variety of sizes.
We look forward to welcoming you to this exhibition.
