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It was in Paris in 2021 that I first saw David Fesl’s work. At that time the pandemic was still a factor, making the entry to France a hustle, let alone the tedious procedures that entailed returning to Japan – All that said, there was something in the air there that I had not felt in Japan. That was when I encountered Fesl’s artworks, exhibited in a room in an old architecture near the Boulogne woodland. They were as mesmerizing to me as a lemon would have been for Motojirō Kajii. I organized this exhibition in the hopes of reinstalling what I felt at that moment, but right here in Japan.
Yuko Nagase, Director, Tomio Koyama Gallery
Tomio Koyama Gallery is pleased to present Prague-based artist David Fesl’s first solo exhibition in Asia.
Since 2015, David Fesl has collected found objects that fit in the palm of a hand. In the home studio environment, he arranges them into small-scale, carefully assembled compositions that follow an internal logic of forms, textures, and colors. By minimal acts such as placing objects next to each other, rotating and interlacing them, he makes the individually distinguishable components of his works temporarily unreadable, so they could gradually open up into a tangle of associations and memories that allow the viewer to remain inside.
The title of the exhibition Hello Yuko, directly refers to a correspondence and communication, in this case, between two human beings – the artist and the gallery director. Hello Yuko points to the restless boundary between the other, the familiar and the intimate, and attempts to capture the meaning of physical contact in the conditions of the present day. Hello Yuko (which remains untranslated to Japanese) also refers to inhabited but detached space – a foreign language for both mentioned above. Alienation and appropriation are inherent to a method how the artist synthesized familiar (all of them can be named, be caught in language) but radically different materials into something irreducibly other. The nature of exhibited compositions seems almost to touch the weightless condition of virtuality.
In Tennoz gallery space, the objects are organized into two levels. The first level – hanging objects installed directly on the wall, is adapted to the height of local visitors. The second level is the wooden board placed on the floor. It carries an ambivalent status; with its position, it balances the volumes of the cubic space but simultaneously dynamizes them.
“Meeting an artifact low to the ground is semantic; in the local context, it takes on additional, new meanings. In this case, it is a different perspective than we are familiar with, for example, with dining. On this board, you can find originally hanging objects, which rest in a horizontal position and are observed by the viewer from above”.
We hope you will take this opportunity to view these artworks that unravel and entangle existing relationships – the natural and the artificial, the mundane and the extraordinary, and the self and other – by the act of shifting and rotating perspectives.
David Fesl (b. 1995, Czech Republic, lives and works in Prague) received his MFA from Academy of Fine Arts, Prague in 2020. His solo exhibitions include Fait Gallery, Brno (2023); ADZ, Lisbon (2022); Sperling, Munich (2022); T293, Also on View, Rome (2021); Lulu, Mexico City (2021); Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna (2020); Karlin Studios, Prague (2020). His works have been exhibited as part of group exhibitions at Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna (2022); The Brno House of Arts, Brno (2021–2022), annex14, Zürich (2021); Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2018) and National Gallery Prague (2016-2017).
https://davidfesl.com
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Director: Yuko Nagase
For press inquiries, please contact: press@tomiokoyamagallery.com (Yuko Nagase, Makiko Okado)
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