Simon Fujiwara

Last updated

Simon Fujiwara, 2016 Simon Fujiwara - 2016.jpg
Simon Fujiwara, 2016

Simon Fujiwara (born 10 September 1982 in Harrow, United Kingdom) is a British artist. [1]

Contents

His works range from paintings and photographs to installations, film and sculptures. They are shown all around the world, for example in the Tate Modern in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.

In 2016 Simon Fujiwara showed shaved furs of animals in Tokyo, a multimedial biography of the Irish "traitor" Roger Casement in Dublin [2] and the skin pigments of the German chancellor Angela Merkel, magnified by the factor of 1,000, in Berlin. [3] In Bregenz (Austria) he built a replica of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Fujiwara sees his art as a mixture of politics, architecture and his own biography. In the Tate St. Ives for example he reconstructed the bar of a hotel his parents ran in Spain when Simon was little. He charged the scene with erotic elements. [4]

Fujiwara's 9m A Spire (2015), in cast jesmonite, at the University of Leeds Laidlaw Library, University of Leeds (25th August 2017) 001.jpg
Fujiwara's 9m A Spire (2015), in cast jesmonite, at the University of Leeds

Life

Simon Fujiwara was born in the London suburb of Harrow. His family (the mother British, the father Japanese) moved to Japan, later to Spain and finally to Cornwall, where Simon discovered his sense for art. He studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and, from 2005 until 2008, art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He lives in Berlin.

Selected exhibitions and reviews

Fujiwara's works have been widely exhibited around the world both in solo and group exhibitions. [1]

'The museum of incest' is among his earliest performance-based works to be selected for individual display marking the beginning of his career as an artist. [7] Originally performed in 2008 at the Limoncello Gallery in London, 'The museum of incest' was replicated in several occasions and contexts throughout the years. A printed guide was published by Archive Books to accompany later versions of the installation. [8]

In 2008, jointly with architect Sam Causer, Fujiwara conceived 'the closet gallery', a site-specific installation launched as part of the London Festival of Architecture and supported by the Architecture Foundation. [9] His residency at the Los Angeles' MAK Centre for Contemporary Art culminated in 2009 with 'Impersonator', a performance investigating the cult of Arnold Schwarzenegger. [10] [7]

First exhibited in 2008 at the Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt am Main, 'Welcome to the Hotel Munber' denounced the oppression and censorship against homosexuals during the Francoist dictatorship in Spain. [11] It was displayed, among the different locations, at Art Basel 41 in 2010, The Power Plant in 2011 and Tate St. Ives in 2012. [12] [13] It received particular attention on international media when in 2011 was censored at the Singapore Biennale. More specifically, some porno-homosexual imagery of the project were removed without the artist's consent. [14] [15] [16]

For the 2010 Frieze Art Fair, he conceived 'Frozen'. Recognised with the Cartier Award for emerging artists, the site-specific installation recreates the archaeological ruins of an imaginary lost civilisation. [17] In 2011 his first theatrical performance 'The boy who cried wolf' was presented at Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer theatre, New York's Performa 11 Biennale and San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. [18] [19] [20]

In his 2015 exhibition "Peoples of the Evening Land" at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City, Fujiwara displayed new bodies of work more closely connected with his adopted home country of Germany, including through works based on rubbish separators used to sort waste in German kitchens, as well as a series of abstract paintings titled "Masks (Merkel)" depicting enlarged portraits of small sections of makeup worn by Angela Merkel. [21]

Awards

Between October 2008 and March 2009, Fujiwara was a MAK Center's artist-in-residence at the Schindler House in Los Angeles. [10] In 2009 was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Interior Architecture. [22] The site-specific installation 'frozen' earned him the Cartier Award 2010 for emerging artists. [23] The same year was awarded the Iaspis Residency in Gothenburg, and simultaneously with 'welcome to the Hotel Munberwon', installation on view at Art Statements, won the Baloise Art Prize. [24] [25] In 2011 was nominated for the South Bank Award for the visual art category. [26]

Related Research Articles

Scott Benzel is an American visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer. Benzel is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frieze Art Fair</span> International contemporary art fair

Frieze Art Fair is an annual contemporary art fair first held in 2003 in London's Regent's Park. Developed by the founders of the contemporary art magazine Frieze, the fair has since expanded to include editions in four cities, in addition to acquiring several other art fairs. Following the original Frieze Art Fair, the fair added Frieze Masters (2012), also in London, dedicated to art made before the year 2000; Frieze New York (2012); Frieze Los Angeles (2019); and Frieze Seoul (2022). In 2023, Frieze acquired The Armory Show in New York, and EXPO Chicago.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aleksandra Mir</span> Swedish-American contemporary artist (born 1967)

Aleksandra Mir is a Swedish-American contemporary artist known for her large scale collaborative projects and for her anthropological methods, involving rigorous archival research, oral history and field work. Her work deals with travel, time, placehood, language, gender, identity, locality, nationality, globality, mobility, connectivity, performativity, representation, transition, translation and transgression.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Singapore Biennale</span> Art biennial

The Singapore Biennale is a large-scale biennial contemporary art exhibition in Singapore, serving as the country’s major platform for international dialogue in contemporary art. It seeks to present and reflect the vigour of artistic practices in Singapore and Southeast Asia within a global context, fostering collaboration and engagement between artists, arts organisations, and the international arts community.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Schütte</span> German artist

Thomas Schütte is a German contemporary artist. He sculpts, creates architectural designs, and draws. He lives and works in Düsseldorf.

Simon Martin is a British artist living and working in London. Martin is known for his video works.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anri Sala</span> Albanian contemporary artist

Anri Sala is an Albanian contemporary artist whose primary medium is video.

Olivia Plender is an artist based in London and Stockholm. She is known for her installations, performances, videos, and comics.

Outset Contemporary Art Fund is an arts charity established in 2003, and based in London, England.

Nathaniel Mellors is an English contemporary artist and musician.

Haroon Mirza is a British contemporary visual artist, of Pakistani descent. He is best known for sculptural installations that generate audio compositions.

Massimiliano Gioni is an Italian curator and contemporary art critic based in New York City, and artistic director at the New Museum. He is the artistic director of the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan as well as the artistic director of the Beatrice Trussardi Foundation. Gioni was the curator of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

Mika Rottenberg is a contemporary Argentine born US based video artist who lives and works in New York. Rottenberg is best known for her video and installation work that often "investigates the link between the female body and production mechanisms". Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Stark</span>

Frances Stark is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, whose work centers on the use and meaning of language, and the translation of this process into the creative act. She often works with carbon paper to hand-trace letters, words, and sentences from classic works by Emily Dickinson, Goethe, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and others to explore the voices and interior states of writers. She uses these hand-traced words, often in repetition, as visual motifs in drawings and mixed media works that reference a subject, mood, or another discipline such as music, architecture, or philosophy.

Athanasios Argianas is a Greek and British artist living and working in London, England. Argianas' practice is interdisciplinary; incorporating sculpture, painting, text, performance and often music or sound, and concerns itself with metaphorical or translated representations of aural experiences. He received his MA from Goldsmiths College, London and previously studied under Jannis Kounellis at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heather Phillipson</span> British artist

Heather Phillipson is a British artist working in a variety of media including video, sculpture, electronic music, large-scale installations, online works, text and drawing. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2022. Her work has been presented at major venues internationally and she has received multiple awards for her artwork, videos and poetry, including the Film London Jarman Award in 2016. She is also an acclaimed poet whose writing has appeared widely online, in print and broadcast.

Defne Ayas is a curator, educator, and publisher in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. Ayas directed and advised many institutions and collaborative platforms across the world, including in China, South Korea, United States, Netherlands, Russia, Lithuania and Italy. She is known for conceiving exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Until June 2021, Ayas was the Artistic Director of 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.

Performa is a non-profit arts organization well-known for the Performa Biennial, a festival of performance art that happens every two year in various venues and institutions in New York City. Performa was founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg. Since 2005, Performa curators have included Charles Aubin, Defne Ayas, Tairone Bastien, Mark Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Laura McLean-Ferris, Kathy Noble, Job Piston, and Lana Wilson. The organization commissions new works and tours performances premiered at the biennial. It also manages the work of choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jen Liu</span> American visual artist

Jen Liu is an American visual artist. She works with video, performance, and painting and creates pieces about labor, economy and national identity. She was awarded a Guggenheim and a Creative Capital award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zoé Whitley</span> American art historian and curator

Zoé Whitley is an American art historian and curator who has been director of Chisenhale Gallery since 2020. Based in London, she has held curatorial positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate galleries, and the Hayward Gallery. At the Tate galleries, Whitley co-curated the 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which was described by ARTnews as one of the most important art exhibitions of the 2010s. Soon after she was chosen to organise the British pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

References

  1. 1 2 Taro Nasu Gallery. "Simon Fujiwara CV" (PDF). Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  2. ↑ Off Topic podcast: Roger Casement biopic, Assassin’s Creed and the future of libraries, Irish Times, May 20, 2016
  3. ↑ Birgit Sonna: Interview with Simon Fujiwara on Merkels Puderdose in Art Magazin, June 2016 Archived 2016-06-09 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ Tate St. Yves, 2012
  5. ↑ "A Spire – Laidlaw Library". Projects. Mike Smith Studio. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
  6. ↑ "Public Art Trail" (PDF). University of Leeds. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
  7. 1 2 "Residency: Simon Fujiwara". MAP Magazine. 1 June 2009. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  8. ↑ Latitudes | Barcelona (30 May 2009), Simon Fujiwara_cover detail , retrieved 23 July 2020
  9. ↑ "Closet Gallery | Architecture Foundation". www.architecturefoundation.org.uk. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  10. 1 2 "Final Projects: Group XXVII | MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles". makcenter.org. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  11. ↑ Taro Nasu Gallery. "Simon Fujiwara CV" (PDF). Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  12. ↑ "The Power Plant – Welcome to the Hotel Munber – 2011 – Exhibitions – The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery – Harbourfront Centre". thepowerplant.org. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  13. ↑ Tate. "Simon Fujiwara: Since 1982, room guide Gallery 4: Welcome to the Hotel Munber 2008–10". Tate. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  14. ↑ Gambillara, Martina (1 June 2012). "Censura a Singapore". Artribune (in Italian). Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  15. ↑ "Artforum.com". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  16. ↑ "Simon Fujiwara: Censored at the Singapore Biennale 2011". www.fridae.asia. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  17. ↑ Heathcote, Edwin. "Frieze special: the underworld of art". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
  18. ↑ "SIMON FUJIWARA – THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF". Performa 11.
  19. ↑ "Simon Fujiwara on being King and his First Love". Performa Magazine. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
  20. ↑ "Simon Fujiwara's The Boy Who Cried Wolf". Performa Magazine. Retrieved 26 August 2020.
  21. ↑ "Simon Fujiwara". Artforum. Retrieved 29 January 2024.
  22. ↑ "Arts Foundation | Fujiwara, Simon" . Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  23. ↑ "Cartier Award 2010". frieze.com. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  24. ↑ "Grantholders 1997 – 2015". www.konstnarsnamnden.se. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  25. ↑ Baloise Group. "Simon Fujiwara – Winner of 2010" . Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  26. ↑ Guardian Staff (1 December 2010). "The South Bank Show Awards 2011: nominee list". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 23 July 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.