Kentaro Kawabata at High Art

Artist: Kentaro Kawabata

Exhibition title: Yours Truly

Venue: High Art, Paris, France

Date: April 23 – May 28, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and High Art, Paris

High Art is pleased to present Yours Truly, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Kentaro Kawabata. Presenting a single series of wall hanging sculptures throughout High Art’s ornately adorned Parisian space, the show highlights key aspects of Kawabata’s singularly developed practice. From the artist’s particular knowledge of the field of ceramics to his experimentation with alchemy and states of matter in the natural world, Yours Truly refines a body of work into a single form, that of the spoon. Taking its title, Yours Truly both figuratively and literally, the artist greets us with an exhibition in the form of an introduction and an offering.

Kentaro Kawabata’s uncanny biomorphic forms are born through a delicate balance of intricate hand modeling and volatile alchemical processes. From submerging silvers in sulphuric water to firing embedded glass in porcelain, Kawabata has spawned a deeply distinctive material and visual vocabulary. Kawabata’s maximalist approach discards the notion that the decorative is superficial, on the contrary embracing its intrinsic generosity as a founding principle of the artist’s sculptural practice. The artworks flourish a vibrant organic vitality, evoking nature’s own regenerative processes and endless recompositions of matter.

In Yours Truly, the familiar shape of a spoon or ladle exists as a foundation for objects which appear explicitly anatomical, biological but emerge as formal abstractions. Overflowing with details: rims, beads, crenelated sprouts and scintillating rinds, these vessels (however stripped of their function) emanate the infinite memories of sharing gestures and ancestral liturgies. The spoon here is presented in the act of offering and being offered, in both common courtesy and with complete abandon, encompassing the fundamental nature of ceramics while evoking nothing less than birth, growth, age, death and entropy.

Kentaro Kawabata, Yours Truly, 2022, exhibition view, High Art, Paris

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass. silver, platinum, 64 x 12 x 16 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 55 x 13 x 11 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 56 x 16 x 12 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 61 x 17 x 10 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass. silver, platinum, 56 x 18 x 15 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass. silver, platinum, 60 x 15 x 15 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass. slag, silver, platinum, 47 x 25 x 14 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 64 x 12 x 16 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 62 x 12 x 12 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 56 x 14 x 8 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 57 x 18 x 8 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, silver, platinum,, 44 x 25 x 12 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 52 x 15 x 10 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 58 x 16 x 13 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 61 x 15 x 11 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 52 x 14 x 12 cm

Kentaro Kawabata, Spoon, 2022, Porcelain, glass, slag, silver, platinum, 55 x 15 x 15 cm