Artist: Kohei Nawa

The Nick and Vera Munro Foundation present a long-awaited exhibition Soma by KOHEI NAWA.

In 2009 KOHEI NAWA celebrated his first German solo exhibition at Galerie Vera Munro under the title Cell. The exhibition today not only marks Nawa’s third solo show in Germany but also a new chapter that delves further into the artist’s experimentations - Soma.

The theme of ‘cells’ has been a consistent thread in Nawa’s creations, and this exhibition serves as a platform for him to reconstruct past works exhibited in Cell while introducing his latest creations. This process of revisiting and reimagining his own work weaves new relationships between old and new pieces, inviting the viewer to delve deeper into Nawa’s creative journey.

“Air Cell,” which arranges glue particles in a grid pattern in the space, forms a cell culture on a slide that has been vertically raised. Each particle illuminated by light becomes the emerging point, evoking the movement of cells that fill the entire exhibition. The cells expressed through glue are linked to “Catalyst,” a hot glue-painted composition that commences at a single point and spreads into space, multiplying and organizing various nearly biological forms and organisms.

The cells that permeate the space establish a visual and tactile connection with the viewer through various mediums. When viewed on the plane, the cells transform into dots and lines, encoding a signal in a viewer’s perception and reverberating with their physical sensations. The ‘Plotter’ series, created using an original Nawa studio-made plotter machine and art materials like brush pens and mechanical pencils, produces fluctuating lines of diverse qualities and variations, revealing the cell’s multifaceted nature. This constant cell oscillation between order and chaos, expressed in grid-like and scattered compositions of diptych ‘Dot-Array_C’ and ‘Dot-Fragment_C,’ further enhances the sensory experience for the viewer.

In the “Rhythm,” the cells’ intricate interactions and their rhythm are made three-dimensional and engraved into space. Eventually, the cells form autonomous structures, leading to works such as “Mol,” which is shaped based on the probability distribution of electrons surrounding water molecules, and “Trans,” which transforms motifs using 3D effects. They are sealed and preserved in another “cell,” a glass dome.

The repeated assembly and dispersing of cells that make “soma” — or “body” in Greek—, as they are encoded and decoded between two- and three-dimensional forms and between various materials and techniques, creates a dynamic and ever-changing landscape. This process of transformation, where cells evolve and adapt, gives rise to new materialities and physical sensations, infusing the viewer with a sense of the artwork’s energy and dynamism.