Fig is pleased to present Interference, a two-person exhibition by Shizuka Okada and Nicholás Guagnini. The exhibition will showcase drawing works on paper by Guagnini, and the recent body of Okada's ceramic works. The exhibition title, Interference, is borrowed from Guagnini's series of drawing works, "A Theory of Interference," presented in the exhibition.
The term 'interfere' or 'interference' often involves negative connotations. Interference in physics, however, is simply a phenomenon that combines two or more waves intersecting to form greater, lower, or the same amplitudes. It is still uncertain how two waves interact, glance off each other, or pass through each other, until the very moment of encounter. To situate two different artists' works in the same space can be seen as an act of making two things that wouldn't have met otherwise. The work of Guagnini and Okada differs in their respective media and contexts. Yet, at the same time, the two artists' works can be examined in a similar liminal space, as in their use of forms and the work's materiality. Aiming to make some resonances between two artists, we also practice observing uncertainties derived from the interference, just as some Surrealists favored Lautréamont's passage.
This exhibition is realized in cooperation with Galerie Max Mayer in Düsseldorf.
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Shizuka Okada was born in 1987 in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. After graduating from Musashino Art University Department of Craft and Industrial Design, majoring in ceramics in 2010, Okada studied further at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in 2013–2016. Recent group exhibitions and major solo exhibitions include; Never the Same Ocean (Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo), Slender and Long My Whistle (Fig., Tokyo), after the small hours (Utrecht/NOW Idea, Tokyo), and For Anything / For Nothing (Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto). Okada currently lives and works in Kyoto.
Nicolás Guagnini is an artist, writer, and filmmaker born in Buenos Aires and lives and works in New York. Since 1997, together with Karin Schneider, he has run the experimental film company Union Gaucha Productions whose films are in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, and the Stuki Museum in Poland. Guagnini was a co-founder of the cooperatively organized exhibition and event space Orchard (2005-2008). Recent exhibitions include Association Pscioanalitica Argentina (Bortolami Gallery, New York), The male Maze and Some Trample L'oeil (Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf), and Union Gaucho Productions (Artists Space, New York). Guagnini's work has been included in a collection at Whitney Museum of American Art, São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, and Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art.
Please contact fig@ffiigg.org for any inquiry.
