In August, the Japan Art Gallery presents a group exhibition that brings together four outstanding positions in contemporary minimalist art. The show, featuring works by Katsuhito Nishikawa, Yuko Sakurai, Jürgen Schön, and Klaus Staudt, explores consistent reduction as well as the interplay of light, line, color and space.
In a visually overstimulating world, the artists focus on slowing down and on stillness. The incoming daylight becomes an active participant in the artwork: it travels across Klaus Staudt’s mathematically precise relief structures and flows around Katsuhito Nishikawa’s gentle, floating sculptures. In Nishikawa’s layered Plexiglas wall installations, the incidence of light brings out a unique quality: the precise layering of the material gives rise to subtle, almost immaterial spaces of color with fascinating depth.
This sculptural sensitivity carries over into the two-dimensional realm. Yuko Sakurai’s multi-layered, colorful surface textures—created through the delicate layering of pigments—harmonize intensely with Jürgen Schön’s latest works. In his current works, created using pencil, colored pencil, and acrylic, the sculptor and draftsman—who lives in Berlin and Dresden—explores the boundary between graphic line and subtle spatial depth.
The exhibition combines Western traditions of Concrete Art with the East Asian aesthetic of empty space (Ma). It invites visitors on a meditative journey where geometry meets poetry.
