VENUES

POETIC SCAPE opened in 2011 in Nakameguro, Tokyo, as a gallery specialized in photography. While photography is at the core of the gallery’s program, in recent years the gallery has also expanded to exhibit non-photographic works. The gallery’s name, POETIC SCAPE, is a combination of poetic and landscape. It aims to bring people into a new landscape that cannot be clearly defined by language but which the artist can certainly see.

The gallery works with artists including Hiroshi Nomura, Toshiya Watanabe, Seiji Kumagai, Kumi Oguro, Daido Moriyama, Sakiko Nomura, and Tracy Templeton. At the gallery, there is also a small shop that sells books by artists who are associated with POETIC SCAPE as well as books on photographic theory. In addition, the gallery also offers framing coordination and workshops.

POETIC SCAPE is pleased to present “HESTER,” a solo exhibition by Belgium-based artist Kumi Oguro, from October 20 – November 20, 2021, marking the artist’s first solo show at the gallery since “Play” in 2012.

Oguro once described her work as “like playing with dolls using real people.” There are various ways of playing with dolls, but the type that the artist refers to is not the type where an imaginary story or stage is set up and the dolls are made to look like characters in the story. Rather, she refers to a more primitive act of placing human-shaped objects in various places and bending their joints: Oguro places people in space and manipulates their poses in a sensual way, without relying on any specific context. The tension between the body and the space, and the force released by the body itself, create a sense of unreality in reality—a sense that is then fixed in her photographic images. Sometimes her work appears to be fantastical, like fragment from a dream, but what the viewer actually sees is the incomprehensibility of what Oguro deems “the creature called human” that exists in reality.

This exhibition will feature 15 works from Oguro’s new artist book HESTER, her first book in 13 years.