Ginza Curator’s Room ＃003 Martin Germann with Kasper Bosmans “Beyond Fish”

Shibunkaku Ginza has been running “Ginza Curator’s Room” since last August, it is a series of exhibitions centering on curators. This program welcomes different curators each time who will create “rooms” that introduce new perspectives and modes of seeing, reflecting their unique points of view.
 
This third exhibition, curated by Martin Germann, the Adjunct Curator of Mori Art Museum, will introduce the Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans and his very first presentation in Japan.
 
Ginza Curator’s Room
https://www.shibunkaku.co.jp/event/gcr3/english/
 
 
 
Ginza Curator’s Room ＃003
Martin Germann with Kasper Bosmans
“Beyond Fish”

Introduction
 
Art is for Belgian artist Kasper Bosmans (*1990, Lommel) a ‘learning tool’, as he once said, and uses painting in a way others would use a notebook. This is particularly the case with his Legend paintings, a continuing series of small and easily transportable wooden panels he has been producing since 2013. The Legends are until today executed in the size of the scanner Bosmans used back then. Intentionally they were invented to replace explanatory texts next to artworks. This perfectly attunes these works to the current age, in which the role of art is being sought into contexts of all kinds, now that the ‘isms’ of the twentieth century have dissolved: anthropology, history, politics, and in the wake of the urgent climate crisis also natural sciences and indigenous knowledges provide material by which to engage the arts as an adaptable vehicle for renewed and revisionist examinations, connections and narratives for the future.
 
Combining a wide spectrum of visual codes, from ancient family heraldry to contemporary technological sign languages, the Legends weave as delightful notational line through Bosmans’ practice. On hand material and tactile, and on the other hand amateur- and even authorless-looking, these works can blend to any possible field of research the artist is concerned with, by capturing and mapping its context. For the invitation for Ginza Curator’s Room #003, the artist selected a couple of animal-related works from Shibunkaku’s collection to mirror their specific context of origin and to link it with his own Western painting tradition from the Low Lands. Within this cross-cultural framework the artist will produce a series of new works and mix those with portable existing sculptures, executed on location.
 
Martin Germann