Nils Karsten “Here Are The Keys”

Ozasahayashi_Project

This event has ended.

Ozasahayashi_Project presents the first solo show in Japan of New York-based, German artist, Nils Karsten. For several years, Karsten’s work has been realized mainly through woodblocks, traditionally rubbed prints, and dry media collage on paper. A woodblock is not only a tool for printing, but also a unique sculptural object. A print can be a finished, stark image; or lately, more often a print is just the intermediate stage of a painting or one element in an installation. Karsten carves the blocks by hand, usually with the help of a dremel. For the past five years, they have been large-scale versions of album covers. He is very much interested in these images that became resident objects in hundred of thousands of homes around the globe, invisibly shared by individuals quite unaware of each other in their most unfettered moments.
The collages are Karsten’s way of thinking - studies in a sense - small-scale and composed of cut-out images assembled on a graphite ground on paper. However, the words on paper simplify his process to inaccuracy. Per Karsten’s approach, paper is far from a classical modernist flat surface on which items sit. Rather, the paper is better understood as an indeterminate mental space - a field of consciousness - in which images move.

This exhibition is also held at Ozasahayashi_Kyoto. Exhibition period: May 7 – June 11