The queues never stop growing in front of the doors of the Grand Palais, where Chiharu Shiota creates the event with a retrospective – to date the largest monograph having been dedicated to him. Two weeks after its opening, on December 11, she displayed Already more than 50,000 visitors to the clock. The bet to seduce the capital is therefore largely a winner for the Spanish artist and Commissioner Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
From the large access staircase, the bewitchment operates with Where are we going ?, A throw of metal boats woven with white threads, with the appearance of wings of cottony angels, in suspension above our heads. We find these sea carcasses, on the ground this time, in Uncertain Journeyfrom which arches of red woolen woolen stretched towards the sky emerge, which wrap the spectator in a huge purple cocoon. And then there is In silence.
As a child, the Japanese artist attended, helpless, at the fire of the house of his neighbors, and seen, the next day, a calcined piano deposited in front of their residence. From this intimate memory was born a device which sees an instrument burned and the ranks of unoccupied chairs caught in a tangle of 200 kilometers of black wires Alcantara, such as the vestiges of a recital room now deprived of sound. The whole work of Chiharu Shiota is made of this essence, at the same time spectacular, emotional, dreamlike and meditative.
Chiharu Shiota, “in Silence” (in silence), 2002-2024.
© / Photo Courtesy Mori Art Museum, Tokyo © Adagp, Paris, 2024
Under the title The soul trembles (The quirtations of the soul), follow one another large -scale installations, each having required a week to ten days of realization,, but also drawings, sculptures, photographs,, Sets created for the opera And videos, which come back to the entire career of Chiharu Shiota.
A course with art performance figures
Born at Osaka in 1972, the visual artist has lived in Berlin since the late 1990s. When he started in Japan, oil painting, whose smell and texture she likes, attracts the young art student at Kyoto University Seika, then very quickly the “blocks”: “I had the impression that everything I created had already been done”. In Germany, where she continues her course with figures of art performance like Marina Abramovic or Rebecca Horn, she tries a solo experience: weave a canvas around her body and her bed with wire. She then sees herself “creating a three -dimensional painting” which would at the same time be a mirror of her feelings. Chiharu Shiota has finally found his prediction material.
The artist in front of his installation “where are we going?” at the Grand Palais.
/ © Grand Palais RMN 2024 / Photo Didier Plowy © Adagp, Paris, 2024 and the Artist
Since then, its clouds of red, white or black triangles, often developed from a personal event and crossed by a powerful sensitive current, fascinate beyond borders and generations. By discovering them, visitors take starts to an immersive experience By becoming the voluntary captives of a gigantic spider web. “All my work is focused on connection and emotion,” she repeats to envy, like a mantra. If the notions of loss and death haunt his work-“less like an end in itself than a new start,” she said-, it is that Chiharu Shiota had to face cancer in 2005 and A recurrence in 2017, two tests which deeply marked its artistic trajectory to train it in “a larger universe”.
Metaphors of links (arterial network, family ties, migratory movements, etc.), his sprawling sons, any holders of anxiety as they are, there is nonetheless an ode to life. You have until March 19 left to get lost in their meanders.