Milan, Tadashi Kawamata brings his nests that transform Brera's architecture

In Milan, the Building gallery is hosting, from March 31 to July 23, 2022, the exhibition Nests in Milan by Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata (Hokkaido, 1953). The exhibition, curated by Antonella Soldaini, is produced in collaboration with the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, the Pinacoteca di Brera, the Fondazione Cariplo and the Grand Hotel et de Milan.

Known worldwide for his multidisciplinary projects, Tadashi Kawamata presents for the first time in Milan a series of installations conceived especially for this occasion. These are site-specific interventions, made with wood, that will take place in the interior spaces of Building and its facade, as well as in the exterior spaces of other buildings in the Brera district. Transcending the boundaries of closed and delimited places, Kawamata’s interventions, born from a reflection on the relationship that his works generate with the social context and human relations, will aim not so much to involve a single building, but to enlarge the area of intervention so as to encompass a portion of the urban fabric of the city.

In this case, we are talking about architectures that, in the context of Milan’s history, contain a particular civic and cultural value and that through the artist’s installations will undergo a delicate and at the same time spectacular process of transformation. Gradually appropriating the interior and exterior spaces (such as facades, balconies, roofs) of the buildings, through a series of constructions obtained by weaving wooden planks to form an inextricable grid, apparently light but with a solid structure, Kawamata will solicit a different reading and interpretation of their appearance and meaning.

Uniting all the interventions will be the choice of a single theme, that of the nest, a subject with a strong symbolic character that Kawamata has been investigating since 1998 when his constructions, which often had abstract forms in the past, came visually closer to depicting a nest. A primordial and primitive architectural element whose simple form, achieved with a natural material such as wood, has even more value when compared with the far more complex constructions on which it is placed, the result of social and cultural stratifications.

Tadashi Kawamata was born in Hokkaido in 1953. He established himself very young on the Japanese and international art scene. At 28, after graduating from Tokyo University of Fine Arts, he was invited to the Japanese pavilion of the 40th Venice Biennale (1982). He later participated in documenta 8 (1987) and 9 (1992). From 1999 to 2005 he was a professor at Tokyo University of Fine Arts, and from 2007 to 2019 he taught at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. In 2005 he was appointed artistic director of the second Yokohama Triennial in Japan. Major site-specific interventions include those at Madison Square Park in New York (2008), Centre Pompidou in Paris (2010), Place Vendôme in Paris (2013) and Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (2013). He has exhibited in major international museums such as Meguro Museum of Art in Tokyo (1993), Kunsthalle in Recklinghausen (1995), Serpentine Gallery in London (1997), Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2016), Pushkin Museum, Moscow (2018) and MAAT Museum of Art Architecture and Technology, Lisbon (2019), Japan House, São Paulo, Brazil (2020). In 2021 he participated in the first edition of the Helsinki Biennale with the site-specific installation Vallisaari Lighthouse. Tadashi Kawamata currently lives and works between Paris and Tokyo.

Image: Tadashi Kawamata, The Shower (2017; installation in situ; Naples, Fondazione Made in Cloister, Chiostro della Chiesa di Santa Caterina a Formiello). Photo by Riccardo Piccirillo © Made in Cloister Foundation, Naples, courtesy of the artist.

Milan, Tadashi Kawamata brings his nests that transform Brera's architecture

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