Press Release

With the group exhibition ‘Review / Preview’, we have the pleasure of giving an initial overview of the programme of Japanese photography at Galerie Priska Pasquer.
Since its earliest days, Galerie Priska Pasquer has regularly played host to individual exhibitions on Japanese photography – including the works of Daido Moriyama, Eikoh Hosoe and Rinko Kawauchi – with further exhibitions in a similar vein currently being prepared for the coming season.
The works that make up the exhibition are drawn from a total of seven decades. The earliest photograph in the exhibition is an experimental oeuvre by avant-garde photographer Osamu Shiihara.

From the 1960s there are two key photographs by Shomei Tomatsu, whose series on the current condition and traditions of Japanese society established him as the most influential photographer since the war.

The 1970s are represented by Issei Suda and his outstanding ‘Fushi Kaden’ series. An exhibition dedicated exclusively to Issei Suda’s work will be held at Galerie Priska Pasquer next November, the first event of its kind to be held in the West.
The exhibition will also include works by Daido Moriyama from the 1980s and 1990s – as the representative of the ‘Provoke Era’, he has had a key influence on Japanese photography since the late 1960s.

Also from the 1980s are a number of works by Nobuyoshi Araki, who holds a singular position in modern photography, primarily owing to his obsessive preoccupation with Eros and Thanatos, juxtaposed with descriptions of his own life.

Contemporary photography is represented in this exhibition by three women photographers. The first of these is Rinko Kawauchi, whose poetic and sensitive works have twice been exhibited by Galerie Priska Pasquer (in Cologne and recently in Paris): namely the series of colour photographs ‘Utatane’ and ‘Aila’.
The second is Mika Ninagawa, whose goldfish series ‘Liquid Dreams’ walks a delicate line between art and pop culture.
And the third is Asako Narahashi, whose work reached a wider audience for the very first time with her series ‘half awake and half asleep in the water’, published last autumn. Following ‘Review / Preview – Japanese Photography’, Galerie Priska Pasquer will present the series ‘half awake and half asleep in the water’ in an individual exhibition (Vernissage 12 Sept.: attended by Asako Narahashi).