Nerhol “For Want of a Nail” at Yutaka Kikutake Gallery
We visited Nerhol’s exhibition “For Want of a Nail.” The venue is Yutaka Kikutake Gallery in Roppongi.
Nerhol is an art duo made up of Ryuta Iida and Yoshihisa Tanaka.
Most recently, their work was selected for the artwork of a Sakanaction album, and they have been drawing increasing attention.
Nerhol is best known for their sculptural works: bundling together 100 or 200 subtly different portraits taken over several minutes, then carving through them with a cutter.
In the summer of 2018, Nerhol participated in “KASHIMA,” an artist-in-residence program held in Beppu, Oita Prefecture.
During their residency, Nerhol researched the process by which Beppu, through the traffic of people and goods from the early Meiji era through the World Wars, developed into one of Japan’s foremost hot-spring resort towns and reached its present state.
Encountering various aspects of the culture shaped within Beppu’s precious hot-spring resources and natural environment, and collecting the oral histories of Beppu residents, they presented a total of 13 works at various sites — starting with Aoi-so, which served as the residency, as well as walls at Beppu Park and local shops.
This exhibition, while functioning in part as the Tokyo touring version of the above show, is composed of works not previously shown in Beppu, along with new pieces created as an extension of that Beppu research.
Recently, their production methods have reportedly been evolving. The cutting process, too, now involves a wider range of tools.
The expressions revealed by these carved-through works carried both a precarious quality — as if depicting the imperfection of contemporary society — and the beauty produced by their overlaid layers.
