From 5/7 to 6/13/2021
Suite one-o-one Four Points by Sheraton Catania
Suite of love
Nobuyoshi Araki
Curated by Filippo Maggia
1,000 polaroids in a room, made by Nobuyoshi Araki between 1995 and 2005: female portraits, flowers, Tokyo skies. With them the entire series entitled “Karuizawa lover’s suicide” from 1996, one of Araki’s most famous story in images, twenty black and white portraits that celebrate love lived to the end, worn as a unique, intense and unrepeatable rite . The setting desired by the artist in suite 101 is completed by the collection of twenty-seven black and white photographs belonging to “Tokyo Comedy” from 1997, one of the many series set in Tokyo where many of the characteristic elements of Araki’s photography appear: the skies of the Japanese metropolis, the artist’s maternal womb, the cat Ciro, the terrace background of many of his images, bondage, Araki’s prehistoric alter ego animals, the slow flow of city life. The gallery could not miss the flowers, “Flower Rond” of 1997, immortalized in the moment of maximum splendor a moment before the inevitable decay, because this is what Araki wants to give us back with his photography: an idea of supreme beauty that in the last works of “Araki Paradise” of 2020, is blurred with melancholy, as if they were a summary of images of a life lived with indispensable intensity
Nobuyoshi Araki was born on May 25, 1940 in Tokyo. Graduated in photography and cinema from the Department of Engineering of Chiba University, he worked for a decade, until 1972, at the Dentsu Advertising Agency, creating his first solo exhibition in 1965 at the Shinijuku Station Building and winning two important photographic competitions. In 1971 he married Yoko Aoki, a central figure in his private life and in his artistic career.
He has recorded, in over 60 years of tireless activity, the life of the Japanese capital, the streets of Ginza, the subway with its endless lines and sleepy passengers, the karaoke bars with customers who flock to it after the office, the clubs privé of the eighties and nineties, the skies of the city, the modern buildings and life on the street, a real diary of an immense metropolis narrated day after day in the “Tokyo Diary” and in other volumes among the more than 500 books published. In 1990, the year of the death of her partner, Araki published the series Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey, about her personal relationship with her.
There are countless publications and exhibitions in international museums all over the world, including: Santa Maria della Scala, Siena (2019); Hungarian House of Photography, Budapest (2019); Pinakothek der Moderne Kunst, Munich (2018); C / O Berlin, Berlin (2018); Museum of Sex, New York (2018); Tokyo Opera City Museum (2017); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2017); Bisazza Foundation, Vicenza (2017); Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, Paris (2016); Hamiltons Gallery, London (2016); Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2014); Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou (2013); Museum fur Ostasiatische Kunst, Cologne (2011); Museum of Modern Art, Lugano (2010); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg (2010); Rupertinum Museum, Salzburg (2009); Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi (2006); The Barbican Art Gallery, London (2005); Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2003); Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, Prato (2000); Center Nationale de la Photographie, Paris (2000); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent (2000); Wiener Secession, Vienna (1997); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporaine, Paris (1995).
It is the beauty and splendor of women that the Japanese photographer wants to exalt, honor, glorify. A beauty that Araki also seeks in his images of flowers, compositions of an almost tangible purity, captured an instant before their process of decay begins. Known and appreciated for his works as well as debated throughout the world for their sometimes defined scandalous content, Araki is in reality not only a bondage photographer, but an artist who totally identifies with photography and its practice, going so far as to state that the camera is like a natural extension of my arm, a gift that has allowed him since the 1960s to document the world around him and, in particular, his life as if it were itself a work of art in continuous evolution.
Filippo Maggia, curator
