Keita Mori — Templates — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 11 → December 23, 2017

The Galerie Catherine Putman presents “TemplatesE”, Keita Mori’s first solo exhibition.

Keita Mori uses threads to create his works, quite literally, but also figuratively, and as one experiment leads to another, the spaces, supports, and materials evolve.

The uniqueness of Keita Mori’s work lies in his technique of drawing with threads, made from silk or cotton, which he fixes with a glue gun on paper, canvas, or directly on walls. He executes his works like a jazz musician, using improvisation and recurrent themes in his drawings—houses, suspended spaces, architectures, and perspectives.

The choice of the exhibition’s title “Templates” was selected by the artist in the same vein as “Bug report”, a generic title for most of his works. “Bug report” is the result of the breaking up of virtual networks such as that of the spaces and architecture of contemporary urban society. What the artist finds interesting in the notion of error is the accidental element, which transforms the spaces and construction, and ultimately results in something different.

The drawings in Keita Mori’s latest series are blended into abstract images, photographs of details of buildings with Modernist architecture. Keita Mori’s ‘templates’ are architectural fragments, used as ‘stem cells’ to transform his own drawings into a modern landscape. These samples, which are taken as though by a biologist, enable him to anchor his rapport with this movement that he sees as the model for the architectural and social principles of contemporary society. Hence, two constructions are superimposed, and the artist projects the future developments of Modernism onto these images, as possible alternative landscapes. This unique series of drawings will be published, accompanied by a text written by Mr Akira Tatehata, the Director of the new Yayoi Kusama Museum in Tokyo.*

Keita Mori’s interest in experimentation is also evident in the use of new materials for the installation he will create on the gallery’s walls.
The exploratory and improvised drawings are always produced with thread, but have in this case been created with copper and silver.

Lastly, the exhibition presents works in which the artist’s spatial conception becomes more complex, creating more unusual forms. The works on white paper play on the innovative transformation of the traditional medium of a white sheet of paper, with irregular hexagons and superposed rectangles.

Exhibition organised with the support for galleries/the first exhibition organised by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP)

• Akira Tatehata: art critic and Japanese poet, President of the Tama University of Fine Arts in Tokyo, and Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama.

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Keita Mori was born in 1981 in Hokkaido, in Japan. He lives and works in Paris.

He graduated from the Tama University of Fine Arts in Tokyo in 2004 (under the direction of Kosei Ishii and Akira Tatehata), the ENSBA (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts) in Paris in 2007 (the Atelier of Jacky Chriqui, Christian Boltanski), and holds a master’s degree in plastic arts and new media (2011) from Paris VIII (under the direction of Phillipe Nys).

In 2017 he inaugurated the Drawing Lab in Paris with the personal exhibition ‘Strings’, curated by Gaël Charbau, and participated in many artist-in-residence programmes and collective exhibitions, including ‘Le dessin, autrement’, curated by Philippe Piguet, at the Galerie de l’Étrave — Espace d’Art Contemporain, in Thonon-les-Bains.

The Galerie Catherine Putman has presented several exhibitions devoted to Keita Mori’s work: at the contemporary drawing fair ‘Drawing Now Paris’ in 2016 and 2017, the international contemporary drawing salon ‘Paréiodolie’, in the Château de Servières, Marseille, in 2016, and in the gallery where he created an installation in situ during the exhibition of the 2015 Fid Prize winners, and in 2013 as winner of the 2012 Fid Prize (ex-aequo with Andreea Ciobica and Juliette Mogenet).

Awards (selection): winner of the Matsutani Prize in 2017, nominated for the ‘Bourse Révélation Emerige 2014’, and for the ‘Prix Découverte-Palais de Tokyo’ by the Friends of the Palais de Tokyo & the Tokyo Art Club, France in 2015, and winner of the international Fid Prize drawing contest in 2012 (grand prize ex-aequo with Andreea Ciobica and Juliette Mogenet).