Gallery Koyanagi is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Christian Marclay (b. 1955) from November 24, 2021 through February 26, 2022, featuring new collages and large-scale woodcut prints.
 
The voice is at the center of the exhibition, while Marclay continues his investigation into the relationship between sound and image through sampling elements from art and popular culture. The collages were all made last year while Marclay was in isolation, as he states:
 
“This new series of collages were created during the first lockdown of 2020, when the pandemic forced me to work alone in my London studio. These works reflect on the fear and anxiety that we were all experiencing then and now, not only due to the pandemic, but also to the erosion of democracy, the rise of authoritarian leaders, systemic racism, and the damage to our environment.”
 
In a group of collages titled Toxic Talk, 2020, skillfully cut-up comic fragments are arranged as opposing rows of angry heads, emitting snaking lines tangled up with one another. The lines give the voices a physical form. These voices remind us that fear often leads to anger.
 
Fear is the subject of Collective Emotion (1), 2020, a striking collage of screaming faces collected from various manga and comic books, and arranged like a chorus onto a red background. The fearful ensemble points to a collective anxiety.
 
Also exhibited are three large woodcut prints created through a combination of digital and traditional techniques. The prints originated from small collages made with fragments of manga and comics, that were scanned, enlarged and carved into cheap OSB boards (made from wood chips) using a computerized carving machine. The woodcuts are printed using an etching press, incorporating the expressive and unique texture of the wood chips. A starting point for these work was Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s lithograph The Scream, 1895, one of the most enduring and recognizable artworks of modernity. Like Munch’s iconic image, Marclay’s characters express an existential trauma that is seen but not heard.
 
The artist also published a new “graphic score” for solo voice, titled No!, 2020, created from collaged comic book fragments. While earlier graphic scores such as Manga Scroll, 2010, incorporated onomatopoeias disconnected from their generative action, No! uses vocal utterances, facial expressions, and body movements to prompt the performer. Writes Marclay, “Like my earlier graphic scores dating back to the 1990s, the use of words that illustrate their sonic counterparts engages non-traditional visualizations of sound as a possibility for generating music.”
 
This new score has been premiered in Japan by EYE of BOREDAMS at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) to coincide Marclay’s survey exhibition there. The exhibition at MOT is the artist’s first large-scale museum exhibition in Japan on view from November 20, 2021 to February 23, 2022. Also, Marclay will be presenting two-days performances “Found in Odawara” with Otomo Yoshihide, Koichi Makigami, Akio Suzuki, Fuyuki Yamakawa and Ami Yamasaki on November 27 and 28 at the Enoura Observatory of the Odawara Art Foundation founded by Hiroshi Sugimoto in the outskirt of Tokyo.
 
Rooted in a sampling aesthetic fundamental to the artist’s practice — from his early musical performances using vinyl records to more recent works in video, photography and printmaking — Christian Marclay uses fragments from the ephemera of popular culture to arrive at new forms and meanings through re-contextualisation.
 
Marclay’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including solo exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California (2019); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2019); Sapporo Art Museum, Japan (2017); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2015); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); MoMA PS1, New York (2009); Cité de la Musique, Paris (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); and Tate Modern, London (2004). Marclay was awarded the Golden Lion at the 54^th Venice Biennale (2011) for The Clock, 2010, which has been shown widely to great acclaim. Marclay has also collaborated with acclaimed artists including John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Sonic Youth, Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee and Otomo Yoshihide.

Gallery Koyanagi

Gallery Koyanagi
Koyanagi Bldg. 9th floor
1-7-5 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
104-0061 Japan