Koji Hatakeyama & Matthew Harris

Eight Faces, 2017 10.2 x 12.5 x 12.5 cm KH-0068

KOJI HATAKEYAMA with works on paper by Matthew Harris

Private view: Wednesday, 6th December, 6-8pm Artists present

Exhibition Continues 7th December 2017 - 12th January 2018

Gallery Opening Hours Tuesday - Saturday: 10am - 6pm Christmas Closure The gallery will close on 23 December 2017 and re-open on 3 January 2018.

Erskine, Hall & Coe 15 Royal Arcade 28 Old Bond Street London W1S 4SP +44 (0) 20 7491 1706 mail@erskinehallcoe.com

Ten Faces, 2017 11 x 12.3 x 12 cm KOH-0060

Eight Faces, 2017 20.7 x 21 x 10 cm KH-0053

Four Faces, 2017 20.8 x 30.5 x 16 cm KOH-0047

KOJI HATAKEYAMA For Koji Hatakeyama, the making of exquisitely beautiful bronze boxes is not an accidental profession but a destiny willingly embraced. He was born in 1956 in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, Japan, which has been a centre for bronze production since the early 1600s.

Today Takaoka accounts for over ninety per cent of production in Japan. This alloy of copper and tin - what Hatakeyama describes as “a material with memories of a thousand years” - was first created over six thousand years ago, but it was in the first century AD that production began in Japan. Always a mark of status, bronze was used primarily for weapons and war-related paraphernalia, although also for mirrors and other objects.

In the Meiji period, however, after 1868, when the wearing of swords was increasingly restricted, the bronze casters of Takaoka turned their traditional skills primarily to these other creative purposes, to the production of functional and decorative objects vividly enhanced by rare surface patinas and exotic inlays. Their renown spread across the world.

It is with this specific inheritance, after graduating from Kanazawa College of Arts and Crafts, that Hatakeyama embarked upon his own career. When asked what drew him to metal, he says simply “I believe that it is a remnant of my previous existence.” But rather than join a studio, Hatakeyama set out from the start as an independent artist.

As he explains, “I believe that within bronze lies a consciousness; one that was created in ancient times but that can also exhibit my own. For me, casting is not just a matter of pouring bronze into a mould. It is a way to express one’s own consciousness.” It is for this reason that Hatakeyama’s lidded bronze boxes, with their simple geometric shapes and gorgeous, fluid painterly landscapes of patination, seem to exist in their own dimension, aloof from the fray of the merely decorative, as concentrated zones of meaning. When you take off the lid, and discover the blaze of gold or silver leaf inside, you have confirmed that these are not ordinary vessels. They stand as metaphors; but with a delicacy and precision of execution so convincing that concept never overwhelms their sensuous beauty. Hatakeyama says, “A person experiencing the aura emitted from the inside of the box, is able to understand the workings of the mind even more. When the box is closed, the inside is plunged into darkness, however, inside this darkness exists a coruscating realm.”

At the deep base of Hatakeyama’s art runs a distinctly Japanese aesthetic response to nature. Not only is this manifest in the shapes and colours he conjures with chemicals and heat from the bronze material, inspired by landscape, but in his feeling for that process itself. Rather than a masterful manipulation, he views his intuitive, improvisatory

actions as liberating the true nature of the bronze. He writes, “I consider, every material hides its own character and I believe that it is my role to draw it out.”

This sympathetic feeling for his material is reinforced by his own Buddhist philosophy, expressed in the Japanese term, “arugamama”, which means “to accept things as they are”.

It is also the case that Hatakeyama’s boxes, for all their modernist formal simplicity and experimental geometries, owe much to the practice and philosophy of the Japanese tea-ceremony, where an array of utensils - tea caddies, fresh water jars, incense burners supports what is simultaneously a social occasion and a spiritual discipline. The honoured emptiness of his vessels, and the refinement and natural beauty of their outer skins, epitomise the wabi-sabi principles at the heart of this ancient ritual. As Hatakeyama has said of his vessels, “There is a sense of enlightenment when opening the lid. My intention is to enter a different world, a different place. This place has no darkness. My consciousness is veiled in bronze.” And yet while the boxes seem to glow with regal grandeur, they recall too the simple wooden boxes that were their moulds before their transformation in the foundry.

But if Hatakeyama’s sensibility is on one level profoundly Japanese, his clear feeling for abstract form owes much also to modern and contemporary Western art. Since 1993 he has been in frequent dialogue with Michael Rowe of London’s Royal College of Art, a renowned metalsmith, and the co-author on a seminal work on the colouring, bronzing and patination of metals. Hatakeyama has exhibited frequently abroad and his works are held in major international collections. He expresses his admiration for the sculpture of British artists Philip King, David Nash, “early Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg”. And Arte Povera, with its experimental interest in everyday materials and care for ordinary life, has also been an important influence. It is this affinity which makes so much sense of the partnership here of Hatakeyama’s bronze boxes with Matthew Harris’s compelling Bric-a-Brac collages. Harris works across different media, between drawing on paper and cloth, building his musical compositions in multiple layers, patched and pieced. These particular works are constructed from mixed media and beeswax on linen bound paper, and owe much to Harris’s travels in Japan. Intuitively, he too builds up out of his humble materials symphonic arrangements of abstract images, landscapes of memory and desire.

Emma Crichton-Miller, 2017, author and arts journalist

Ten Faces, 2017 9.8 x 12.5 x 10.5 cm KOH-0059

Eight Faces, 2016 16.8 x 14.5 x 14.5 cm KH-0049

Eight Faces,, 2017 33.5 x 16 x 16 cm KH-0045

Eight Faces, 2017 15.2 x 6.3 x 5.5 cm KOH-0062 Eight Faces, 2017 16 x 6 x 6 cm KOH-0061 Four Faces, 2016 8 x 4.5 x 4.5 cm KOH-0079 Eight Faces, 2017 10.7 x 4.5 x 4.5 cm KOH-0076 Eight Faces, 2017 7.3 x 10.8 x 7.7 cm KOH-0063

Eight Faces, 2017 24.6 x 11.5 x 11.5 cm KH-0058

Eight Faces, 2017 20.2 x 20.5 x 10.5 cm KOH-0054

Eight Faces, 2016 14.5 x 12.5 x 12.5 cm KH-0052

Eight Faces, 2017 7.7 x 11.5 x 9.5 cm KOH-0071

Four Faces, 2017 6.7 x 10.5 x 7 cm KOH-0073

Four Faces, 2016 8 x 5.5 x 5.5 cm KOH-0078

Six Faces, 2017 15 x 10.5 x 9.5 cm KOH-0070

Eight Faces, 2016 13.7 x 14 x 14 cm KOH-0051

Six Faces, 2017 25.5 x 12.5 x 11 cm KH-0057

Eight Faces, 2017 15.2 x 6.3 x 5.5 cm KOH-0062

Ten Faces, 2017 18 x 20 x 20 cm KH-0046

Bric-a-Brac, Variation III, 2017, 27 x 23 cm, MH-0040

Bric-a-Brac, Variation IV, 2017, 27 x 23 cm, MH-0041

Four Faces, 2017 14.7 x 12 x 12.5 cm KH-0065

Six Faces, 2017 20.8 x 20.5 x 11.5 cm KOH-0055

Six Faces, 2017 15.7 x 15.5 x 11.5 cm KH-0067

Six Faces, 2017 11 x 6 x 5 cm KOH-0075

Ten Faces, 2017 11 x 12.3 x 12 cm KOH-0060 Eight Faces, 2017 6.3 x 7 x 6.5 cm KOH-0074 Four Faces, 2017 14.7 x 12 x 12.5 cm KOH-0065 Four Faces, 2016 8 x 5.5 x 5.5 cm KOH-0078 Eight Faces, 2016 14.5 x 12.5 x 12.5 cm KOH-0052 Eight Faces, 2017 33.5 x 16 x 16 cm KOH-0045

Six Faces, 2017 15.7 x 13.5 x 13 cm KOH-0050

Eight Faces, 2017 7.3 x 10.8 x 7.7 cm KOH-0063

Bric-a-Brac, Variation V, 2017, 30 x 38 cm, MH-0042

Bric-a-Brac, Variation VI, 2017, 37 x 38 cm, MH-0043

Six Faces, 2017 10 x 5.5 x 5 cm KOH-0077

Four Faces, 2017 16.3 x 21 x 14 cm KH-0066

Eight Faces, 2017 11 x 11 x 11 cm KOH-0069

Six Faces, 2017 23.3 x 13 x 12 cm KH-0056

Four Faces, 2016 8 x 4.5 x 4.5 cm KOH-0079

Eight Faces, 2016 17.3 x 15 x 15 cm KH-0048

Koji Hatakeyama (b. 1956) Born in the Toyama Prefecture of Japan, Hatakeyama grew up in Takaoka, a city renowned for metal casting. He makes unpretentious cast bronze articles, particularly lidded boxes, which are not intended to necessarily be functional.

He has exhibited widely in Japan and abroad, and has recently become a professor at Kanazawa College of Art. Hatakeyama won the MOA Museum Art Award in 2012, the grand prize of the Sano Renaissance Metal Casting exhibition in 2007 and the Takashimaya Art Award from the Takashimaya Cultural Foundation in 2000.

His work may be viewed in many international public collections, including the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Matthew Harris (b. 1966) A graduate of the Fine Art Textile Course at Goldsmiths College in London, Harris makes work in both paper and cloth.

He has exhibited widely throughout the UK, Europe, the USA and Japan. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the first Arts Foundation Award for Textile Art and in 2009, he completed Scorched, a ten-metre long Graphic Score for the new Colston Hall in Bristol.

Six Faces, 2017 8.3 x 11 x 8.5 cm KOH-0072

Eight Faces, 2017 16 x 6 x 6 cm KOH-0061

All works by Koji Hatakeyama are cast bronze.

Pictures by Matthew Harris are mixed media and beeswax on linen bound paper, and the dimensions listed are unframed. www.erskinehallcoe.com/exhibitions/koji-hatakeyama-2017/ Design by fivefourandahalf Printed by Witherbys Lithoflow Printing Photography of cast bronze boxes by Stuart Burford Photography of pictures by Peter Stone