KOJI ENOKURA | MAXIMILIAN SCHUBERT

KOJI ENOKURA | MAXIMILIAN SCHUBERT March 2 – April 13, 2014 | 11 Rivington St, NY Eleven Rivington is delighted to present recent work by NY artist Maximilian Schubert in dialogue with the photographic work of Japanese Mono-ha artist Koji Enokura (1942 – 1995).  The exhibition is on view from March 2 – April 13 at the gallery’s 11 Rivington Street location, and will feature vintage photographic prints from the 60s and 70s by Enokura; and Schubert’s recent wall sculptures made with square brass rods.  The juxtaposition of Enokura and Schubert presents an encounter between two artists whose works traffic in ideas of tension and measure, and the consciousness of possible movement between rest and action.

Koji Enokura is one of the most significant artists of the Japanese post-war period. His wide-ranging oeuvre encompassed performance, installation, sculpture, painting and photography. Much of Enokura’s practice centered on interventions and temporary constructions, focusing on ideas about the environment and temporality; and the crossing and subversion of boundaries between disparate mediums and ideas. He used unconventional methods and mediums and often paired natural and industrial materials in search of beauty; Enokura stated, “art is sensitivity not technique.” Included in the exhibition are five black and white photographs, including a vintage image of Wall, 1971, one of the artist’s most well known works in which a cement wall is held up and gripped by two trees; and examples from the artist’s P.W. (Photo Works) series.  Enokura was born in in Tokyo in 1942 and died in 1995 at the age of 53. His work has been widely exhibited in Japan and internationally, including a retrospective at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in 2005. 

Maximilian Schubert's work often blurs distinctions between painting and sculpture, conflating surface, support and gesture into contrasting and often adversarial formal relationships. In his recent series of wall sculptures, titled Format, lengths of brass converge at minute hinges, folding the rectangular structure into opposing angles that appear to expand or contract as one moves past the work. These works appear paused in space, their motion arrested in one of many possible iterations. Schubert was born in 1983, studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His works have been exhibited at Eli Ping Gallery, NY; Martin Asbaek Gallery, Copenhagen; Bureau, NY; and Galleri Tom Christoffersen, Copenhagen, among others.