Yoshihiro Suda – New Sculptures
February 21 – April 3, 2004
Opening reception: Saturday, February 21, 2004


D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present its third exhibition with Japanese sculptor Yoshihiro Suda and his first solo exhibition in New York in nearly four years. The exhibition will consist of three new works conceived specifically for the gallery space. Suda hand carves and paints delicate, hyperrealistic actual-size common plants and flowers. Despite the obsessive attention to detail that makes Suda’s sculptures virtually indistinguishable from real plants, the works have no referent in the real world: each is an imagined hybrid of several specimens gathered from around his one-room studio in Tokyo. The sculptures’ precisely calibrated placement in the gallery—whether within specially constructed corridors and rooms or at out-of-the-way points in the existing space—calls for a heightened attention to the physical relationships between object and environment. James Rondeau writes:

Suda’s exhibitions are staged as quietly theatrical dramas of scale. Considered in terms of technique and craftsmanship, his exquisitely beautiful carvings are a tour de force. As works of installation art, however, they are modest, effacing, and at times nearly invisible. For Suda, meaning is not conveyed by the objects per se; his work is truly activated only in relationship to its surroundings. As such there is a temporal, even performative, aspect to his artistic practice. Ultimately Suda locates significance in the moments of encounter between environment, sculpted form, and viewer.

In 2003, Suda presented his first museum exhibition in the United States at the Art Institute of Chicago, part of the museum’s focus series curated by Rondeau. Other recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Galerie Wohnmaschine, Berlin, a special one-man project as part of the 2003 Kyoto Biennial, and group exhibitions at La Colleción Jumex, Mexico City, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille, France, the Japan Foundation in Budapest, Hungary, and at various museums and galleries across Japan. He will participate in an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris this spring.