Nonaka Hill continues being the most consistently interesting gallery in Los Angeles this month with Chimeras—a show pairing strange biomorphic works on paper from the ‘70s by the late Sawako Goda with strange new biomorphic sculptures from Kentaro Kawabata.
A storied mutlimedia artist who has worked in nearly every mode, Goda’s works here are ghostly Xeroxes of surreal and vaginally symmetrical assemblages of fish and small trinkets informed by a childhood playing and tinkering in the in ruins of post-war Japan. The works’ techno-organic texture and skin-like specificity of the surfaces exists in bizarre tension with the casualness of their production. They give familiar objects the sense that they have always been merely fragmentary and only now are being returned to their proper status as integrated elements of Goda’s alien sigil.
Kawabata’s work likewise possess the symmetry of surreal bodies surreally exposed—variegated earth-and-jewel colors swim across and through the oysterlike surfaces of ceramic shapes evoking bone, body, torn flesh and tool. Despite their variety and material hybridity, they all maintain a common sense of tragic recontextualization—like sea creatures sagging on display stands or turned into furniture. This is all the more remarkable considering Kawabata’s consistent avoidance of both standard body-shape references (no identifiable teeth, intestines, legs, eyes, tentacles) and all-out gestural expressionism (one senses a form is being presented, rather than shaped by human hands).
What’s going on at Nonaka Hill is truly fascinating—coming off impressive shows from Key Hiraga and Kaoru Ueda, the gallery appears to be not simply importing work from Japan but revealing an entire alternate history of art-making that is not only virtually unknown to the American and European art world but that has managed to avoid all of its most tedious dead-ends.
Image: Courtesy Nonaka Hill