Takahiko Sugawara – Repetitive Nature

19 ~ 29 May
Opening Saturday 21 May, 2-5pm

Japanese sculptor Takahiko Sugawara has been based in Melbourne since 2012. For Repetitive Nature, his second exhibition with Tinning Street, he will be presenting a major work taking up almost the entire length of the gallery, and wholly made from matchsticks. Sugawara makes use of simple geometric forms, which he repeats en masse to form intricate large-scale sculptures. The organic hand-building of individual structural layers brings an entrancing tactile quality to the otherwise austere sculptures.

These ideas of repetition, form, and discipline are rooted in Sugawara’s teenage years where he was in Japan’s number one high school marching band. The band practised for six hours a day, every day, walking in formation, making lines and shapes whilst playing their instruments . A gap, an empty space, made by a band member’s absence, combined with repetition and the shapes they made, have directly influenced Sugawara’s ideas of form, layering, overlap and repetition.