We are proud to present Izumi Taro’s solo exhibition Sit, Down. Sit Down Please, Sphinx. at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
Izumi Taro (b. 1976) is a Japanese artist with an experimental practice rooted in his highly diverse range of interests and concerns. This practice includes creating systems that resemble the internal organs of his works, and producing works that explore the possibilities of existence, works that construct furniture-like sculptures shifting between the mediatised body and the unadulterated, physical body, and performances that extend or replace bodily functions, returning the functions of tools to the human body. Izumi is constantly investigating his own memories and knowledge from a critical perspective, and uses the contradictions that he finds there as inspiration for creating consistent and coherent interpretations and ways of thinking.
Izumi actively exhibits internationally, including Pan at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2017, which was his first solo exhibition outside Japan, followed in 2020 by another solo exhibition, ex, at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland.
Produced through complicated and irrational processes, his art is diverse and cannot be put under one category. For his first solo exhibition at a museum in Tokyo, he launches a perpetual motion machine for confronting the unknowable, mixing thought processes involving many keywords, such as burial mounds, imperial mausoleums, strikes, rewilding, feigned illness, and the manning and hooding of falconry with experiences like cosplay, camp, and being entombed in a funeral mound.