ACG Reflections 2: Practices of Transition -Satoshi Kawata, Hitoshi Nomura, Saburo Murakami-
2025. 8.19 [Tue.] – 9.20 [Sat.] 11:00−18:00 [Sat. −17:00] Closed on Sun., and Mon.
ACG Reflections is an exhibition that spotlights the practices of seasoned artists, reexamining the threads that run through their works and the evolution of their artistic journeys.
In the postwar art scene in the Kansai region of Japan, the acute sensitivities of artists spurred the development of experimental approaches that engaged with materials and space through the active involvement of the body. Their works resist becoming fixed Things, instead unfolding as movement generated through processes of transformation that encompass phenomena and actions. Earlier works are often revisited and reinterpreted using alternative materials and methods.
This exhibition will also highlight Saburo Murakami’s “Paper-Breaking” series and documentation capturing the decisive moment (1956); Hitoshi Nomura’s The Center of Gravity: Movement and Turning the Arm with a Movie Camera: Person, Landscape, which record the repetition of bodily movements on film (both in 1972); and Satoshi Kawata’s mural work which encompasses the acts of painting, removal, and relocation (2025, produced at ARTCOURT Gallery).
Together, the unique process-driven practices of these three artists invite us to reconsider the enduring relationship between movement, body, space, and the realm of plastic expression in postwar and contemporary Kansai.
Related events
- 9.20 [sat]
【Satoshi Kawata】The removal of mural work using the strappo technique will be open to the public.
*Details will be announced on our website, social media and so on.
Artist
Kawata studied fresco technique in university, working with plaster and pigments, and began his career primarily producing murals in public spaces. Through creating semi-permanent works for exhibitions, he has repeatedly undertaken the “relocation of murals,” making the sequence of painting, removal, and reinstallation the very foundation of his practice. Beyond physical relocation, this process also carries the memory and resonance of the space, serving as a practice that reconsiders the inherent “relationship between place and memory” of painting. In recent years, Kawata has adapted the strappo technique, publicly performing the peeling away of emblematic images of contemporary urban landscapes, as he explores new possibilities for murals transformed into mutable forms.
[Selected exhibition] Re: Human - The New Human Condition / Study: Osaka Kansai International Art Festival 2025, Semba Excel Building, Osaka, 2025 / MOT Annual 2024 on the imagined terrain, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2025 / Kawata Satoshi: Techne for the Public, The Triangle, Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, 2024 / Satoshi Kawata: A Letter from A Far, ARTCOURT Gallery, Osaka, 2022, and more.
Beginning in the late 1960s, Nomura began creating works in which photography became his primary sculptural medium, capturing with the camera the shifting states of matter as they responded to gravity and the passage of time. By the mid-1970s, he turned his lens to the movements of celestial bodies, and from then on deepened his interest in how the phenomena around him and the workings of life arise from the sublime and dynamic order of nature. He also expanded into an increasingly diverse array of materials and media, depicting Time on the scale of the origins of the universe, the emergence of life, and the evolution of terrestrial organisms, in his pursuit of a singular spatial expression that illuminates the “moto” (source) behind the phenomena and the formation of the material world.
[Selected exhibition] Hitoshi Nomura: Cosmic Sensibility, ARTCOURT Gallery, Osaka, 2024 / Re: play 1972/2015 - Restaging "Expression in Film '72,” The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2015 / NOMURA HITOSHI: Perception - Changes in Time and Field, National Art Center,Tokyo, 2009 / Nomura Hitoshi Transit/Reflect, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, 2001, and more.
Cooperation: Nomurakenkyushitsu
Saburo Murakami (1925-1996)
As a member of the Gutai Art Association, Murakami broke new ground in postwar art with his iconic “Paper-Breaking” series, which can be seen as an early foray into performance art. His oeuvre encompassed numerous paintings alongside installations and conceptual works. Even after his time with Gutai, he continued to pursue ephemeral expressions rooted in the “Here and Now,” unbound by conventional genres and techniques. Murakami’s practice confronted the act of living itself, seizing each fleeting moment, as thought and action, time and space converged into a harmonious whole culminating in painting as phenomena—an experience that offers all-encompassing and immediate awareness of reality.
[Selected exhibition] Unlimited World / Murakami Saburo, Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, 2021 / Murakami Saburo, ARTCOURT Gallery, Osaka, 2017 / Saburo Murakami exhibition, Ashiya City Museum of Art and History, 1996 / Hors Limites: L’arte et la vie 1952-1994, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1994, and more.