Rinko Kawauchi
10 May - 31 Jul 2008
RINKO KAWAUCHI
"Utatane"
Galería Pepe Cobo is pleased to present Rinko Kawauchi’s first solo show in Spain, where she will present sixteen photographs from the Utatane series.
The title of this series is given by a state which in English tongue has no equivalent, but which could be referred to as “light or restless sleep”: a state between sleep and vigil. Maybe this is because it is through the mist of dream and precisely because of it that one is able to take better notice of the things that shine through it and stand out, and which Kawauchi hastens to trap in her beak and safeguard in her nest. As in a dream, but making a great effort to stay awake, Rinko Kawauchi fights to keep conscious with the intention of not loosing detail, tired, or even exhausted (as seems to betray that certain white veil that falls like a yawn over her works) but animated by an inexhaustible curiosity and a palpable anxiety: to never let anything go unnoticed, specially the unnoticed (which Kawauchi refers to as “the ordinary”).
Kawauchi devotes herself to what almost always tends to be brief, small, and to extinguish as rapidly in time as it does in the memory of men. The resistance of Kawauchi to close her eyes is also her opposition to that which, being translatable into information, prevails over the unnamable and drowns it. Each of Kawauchi’s photographs is at the same time a homage and an epitaph, and her work a gigantic mausoleum erected to commemorate the memory of what, day after day, passes without leaving a trace.
Rinko Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga, Japan. In 2002 she was credited with the 27th Kimura Ihei Award for her publications Utatabi and Hanabi (Little More ed.). Solo presentations of his work over the past five years have included exhibitions at le Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, París 2005, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brasil or the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Rinko continues publishing: Aila, The eyes and the ears, Semear (Foil) o Cui cui (Foil, Fondation Cartier, ACT Sud).
"Utatane"
Galería Pepe Cobo is pleased to present Rinko Kawauchi’s first solo show in Spain, where she will present sixteen photographs from the Utatane series.
The title of this series is given by a state which in English tongue has no equivalent, but which could be referred to as “light or restless sleep”: a state between sleep and vigil. Maybe this is because it is through the mist of dream and precisely because of it that one is able to take better notice of the things that shine through it and stand out, and which Kawauchi hastens to trap in her beak and safeguard in her nest. As in a dream, but making a great effort to stay awake, Rinko Kawauchi fights to keep conscious with the intention of not loosing detail, tired, or even exhausted (as seems to betray that certain white veil that falls like a yawn over her works) but animated by an inexhaustible curiosity and a palpable anxiety: to never let anything go unnoticed, specially the unnoticed (which Kawauchi refers to as “the ordinary”).
Kawauchi devotes herself to what almost always tends to be brief, small, and to extinguish as rapidly in time as it does in the memory of men. The resistance of Kawauchi to close her eyes is also her opposition to that which, being translatable into information, prevails over the unnamable and drowns it. Each of Kawauchi’s photographs is at the same time a homage and an epitaph, and her work a gigantic mausoleum erected to commemorate the memory of what, day after day, passes without leaving a trace.
Rinko Kawauchi was born in 1972 in Shiga, Japan. In 2002 she was credited with the 27th Kimura Ihei Award for her publications Utatabi and Hanabi (Little More ed.). Solo presentations of his work over the past five years have included exhibitions at le Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain, París 2005, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brasil or the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Rinko continues publishing: Aila, The eyes and the ears, Semear (Foil) o Cui cui (Foil, Fondation Cartier, ACT Sud).