Kazuna Taguchi

mumok will be mounting the first solo museum exhibition of the artist Kazuna Taguchi, who was born in Tokyo in 1979 and has been living in Vienna since 2013. A graduate of painting from the Tokyo University of Arts, Taguchi has since been honing her idiosyncratic, anachronistic and introverted studio practice. Her meticulously composed monochrome photographs often convey (female) body fragments, gestures, and gazes and resonate with the surrealist tradition, in which moments of the dreamlike and ghostly, the reference to death and questions of the photographic representation of the female body are explored.

While Taguchi's works are digitally informed, they are based on an analog and handson approach at the intersection of painting and photography: In an intricate process, the artist combines various visual sources reproduced in different media (including references to her earlier works, anonymous magazine snippets, and historical works of art) to a hybrid photomontage, which she then translates into a painting or drawing only to photograph it in various environments and finally manipulate the prints in the darkroom. The artist compares the multiple layers and repeated interventions that lead to a permeation of myriad textures, time planes, and narrative spaces to the work of a painter who keeps tirelessly returning to her easel and brush. At the same time, the intangible distance emanating from the otherworldly yet obviously deliberately composed photographs bespeak Taguchi’s rebellious attitude toward a present that is governed by visual feedback loops and the narcissistic deand reconstruction of the digital “self.”

Curated by Heike Eipeldauer 

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