David Zwirner: Shio Kusaka
Rue Vieille du Temple, Paris
September 05 – October 05, 2024

David Zwirner is pleased to present its second exhibition with Shio Kusaka, which also marks the reopening of the gallery’s newly renovated Paris location. Known for her playful and instinctive approach to the medium of ceramics, Kusaka makes vessels that embrace organic imperfections, recurrent techniques and patterns, and imagery that alludes to historical, contemporary, and futuristic forms. The artist’s complex designs highlight poetic irregularities and optical qualities. Kusaka’s work is inspired by a wide range of references: personal observations, textures, patterns, architecture, fantasy, and outer space, among others.

In the artist’s Paris presentation (her first in the city) Kusaka places new forms across a pedestal spanning the length of the gallery, subtly echoing the installation of one light year, in which her works were arranged in a line on flat copper plates on the floor at her 2022 inaugural solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York. Here, the pedestal extends from the wall into the exhibition space and is raised to bring the viewer closer to the works themselves, which are arranged by height from shortest to tallest, and help navigate the gradual shift in scale.

These works reflect Kusaka’s desire to return to a more intimate scale of making and experiencing, inviting audiences to closely observe the meticulous details applied to her forms. By doing so, they evince the artist’s recent interest in quantum mechanics, the field of physics that describes the atomic and subatomic behavior of nature, and the centrality of the observer in witnessing shifting states of matter.

The exhibited forms reflect a daily and organic process of inquiry, in which the artist is shepherded by moments of randomness and uncertainty. Kusaka also delves into familiar motifs and techniques – including her signature method of carving, which often steers her use of glazes and approach to firing. Some of the vessels elucidate details originally found on the pottery of the Jomon (c. 10,500-300 BC), Yayoi (c. 300 BC-AD 300), and Kofun (c. AD 300-552) periods in Japan. The gently scalloped surface of certain works mimics the draped clothing of kouroi, marble sculptures of human figures from Archaic Greece (c. 650-480 BC). Other black and terracotta ceramics by Kusaka resemble Athenian vases from a similar era.

Kusaka also continues to explore themes relating to the cosmos, which she first engaged within one light year. Merging references from movies and television shows like Star Trek and The Mandalorian, as well as American science-fiction digests such as Imagination (1950-1958), individual works and groupings invoke flying saucers and planetary ring systems. Likewise, quivering lines that mimic soundwaves and seismological signals express the artist’s interest in the concept of wave-particle duality and the vibratory and responsive patterns that guide her relationship with form.

In an adjacent exhibition space, Kusaka debuts four large new paper lanterns, fabricated in collaboration with the Kyoto-based company Kojima Shōten. Archetypal alien spaceships and their attendant beams are constructed from paper and bamboo. Glowing with inner light, these celestial shapes are born not only from Kusaka’s fixation with this iconic form but also from our collective conception of outer space and interest in the unknown.

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