Artist: Yuji Agematsu

Galerie Buchholz presents an exhibition by Yuji Agematsu in two parts. The first part, “Zip: 01-01-2024 - 12-31-2024”, opens for Gallery Weekend Berlin, and features a year of “zips” - tiny devotional sculptures Agematsu produces from detritus that he comes across in New York’s streets, and then gardens lightly inside the cellophane sleeves of cigarette packs. Three hundred and sixty-six of these zips are displayed on shelves at Galerie Buchholz, memorializing daily walks taken in succession over the year 2024, a leap year. Since 1996, Agematsu has made one zip for each day, thirty years of walking and arranging. To this day, he still cannot resist the clarity of the world in the cellophane, all those days, all those walks, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning or end.

The second subsequent part of the exhibition “Marseille 1994” will open at the end of June in the Berlin gallery with a performance by the artist. Agematsu will premiere a new work - an installation of projected 35mm photographs he shot in the streets of Marseille in 1994.

Yuji Agematsu (b. 1956, Kanagawa, Japan) has lived in New York since 1980. He studied with Tokio Hasegawa, a member of the band Taj Mahal Travellers, and the jazz drummer and choreographer Milford Graves. His work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; as well as Pinault Collection, Paris; and Loewe Foundation, Madrid.

This is the first solo exhibition of Yuji Agematsu with Galerie Buchholz and the artist’s first in Germany.