KISHIO SUGA

Pirelli HangarBicocca SITUATIONS Japanese artist Kishio Suga’s 2016 exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan marked the first time that a retrospective of his work was held outside of Japan. For the show, which was entitled “Situations,” curators Yuko Hasegawa and Vicente Todolí brought together 23 installations, mostly re-creations of earlier works that Suga reinterpreted for the architecture and mood of the industrial HangarBicocca. Suga began his career as a founding member of Mono-ha—literally, “school of things” in Japanese—an avant-garde group active in Japan in the late-1960s and early ’70s. Mono-ha centered on works that used simple, mostly unprocessed materials, such as wood, concrete, rocks and metal, with artistic intervention reduced to a minimum. The group rejected the idea that art is a form of subjective expression, and instead presented materials and objects as…