• OKAMOTO Atsuo

    Link to : OKAMOTO Atsuo website

    CAREER1951
    Born in Hiroshima, JAPAN
    1977
    Compleated graduate shcool of master’s program of Tama Art University, Department of Sculpture

    PERSONAL EXHIBITIONS:
    2004-’05
    Mizunokuni Museum 104, Shimane
    2003
    Gallery Yamaguchi, Tokyo (2000/ ’99/ ’97/ ’95/ ’93/ ’91/ ’89/ ’87/ ’85/ ’83)
    Contemporary Art Museum Ise, Mie
    1999
    TUES1999 – A view of Contemporary Sculpture. The Utsukushi-ga-hara Open Air Museum, Nagano
    1998
    The Plus / Minus Foundation, Renesse, HOLLAND
    ArtAffairs, Amsterdam, HOLLAND
    1996
    Gallery Emon, Nagoya (’94/ ’92)

    SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS and OTHERS:
    2004
    “Atsuo Okamoto + Noda Hiroji” The 3rd collaboration. Gallery Yamagichi, Gallery Tokyo Humanite
    ONDO ArtScape – Genius Loci. Ondo, Hiroshima
    2003
    The 5th Exhibition of Amabiki Village and Sculpture. Yamato, Ibaraki (’01/ ’99/ ’97 – ’98/ ’96)
    The Imaginary City “Metamorphosis” Hiroshima; Experimental Artworks Exhibition 2003. Hiroshima
    2002
    Sculptors of Eastern Japan. Tokyo Station Gallery, Tokyo

    SYMPOSIUMS:
    2003
    Bitburg International Sculpture Symposium. Bitburg, GERMANY
    2000
    Kyongnam International Sculpture Symposium. Changwon, KOREA
    1998
    1998 Symposium of Sculpture in Yonago. Tottori

  • Sculpt a breath 2022

    Sculpt a breath 2022
    Basalt Boulder
    105×105×125 (h)cm, 110×100×50 (h)cm

  • excavate a breath – 1, 2, 3

    excavate a breath – 1, 2, 3

    White Granite
    70×55×150 (h)cm, 167×37×63 (h)cm, 95×84×55 (h)cm

  • moony MARUDA

    moony MARUDA

    White granite, Acrylic color

    86×70×170 (h)cm

  • going to be a wind – from CRUST-cocoon ’99

    going to be a wind – from CRUST-cocoon ’99

    White granite

    100×85×225 (h)cm

    Sculpture in 2005. It was an abandoned house back then too but eight years have passed, and the shed and storehouse have both collapsed. Overgrown in weeds and bamboo, it is losing all remnants of evidence that people used to live here.
    I chose this location because I had a plan to condense the energy of the local community.
    However I ran into some trouble with the stone I was using for the base of the plan, and had to give up on my original idea. However, on October 20th, the Lifelong Learning Department hosted a workshop and I was able to complete a miniature version of my original idea with help from local children and their parents. is miniature version is on display in the Citrus Lobby where the AMABIKI information desk is.

  • forest 2011-Planet

    forest 2011-Planet

    Boulder stone, Andesite

    145×112×110 (h)cm
    110×43×75 (h)cm

    I use a pneumatic rock drill to make holes into the stone. Every one of those holes meets at the core of the stone. Each time a hard stone that was part of the planet is pierced by a hole, it starts to breathe. I am devoted to digging out the reborn form of the forest from inside the stone.

  • Distant horizon

    Distant horizon

    White granite, Film
    50×95×215 (h)cm

    Getting smeared with earth on a broad landscape… I am beset with unease that I still cannot see where I am going.
    Nevertheless, the one thing I don’t want to lose, as someone alive today, is the bright hope within me.

  • Distant water

    Distant water

    White granite

    50×100×170 (h)cm

    Plum and persimmon trees grow in a walled space of an abandoned residential lot. A dried up water pipe stands alone next to a rusty pump like a dead branch. If you dig down into the ground from there, one would expect to reach a water vein, but I decided to carve upwards, looking for a distant, lost vein of water.

  • UNIT 2003 W.B.M

    UNIT 2003 W.B.M

    White granite, Black granite, Marble

    18×34×200 cm (×3P)

    Weeds were growing on the land, and various old utensils were scattered around the barn. The inside of the storehouse had grown into a bamboo grove.
    I placed my UNIT in this space, which had lost its owner.

  • POSITION (unit, crust)

    POSITION (unit, crust)

    White granite, Acrylic paint

    86×194.5×45.86 cm_1200 kg
    86×33×220 cm_900 kg
    30×25×350 cm_50 kg

    Coloring sculptures and buildings has existed as an occupation since ancient times, but I believe adding arbitrary colors to surfaces as the form, material and texture of sculpture is far from making sculpture sublime by cutting away all that is superfluous.
    While I am aware that these works are probably expressions of my own vagueness, in an environment that changes intensely, from winter desolation to the beginning of spring, I could not bear the obvious confrontation of the sculpture alone being an immobile and unchanging presence.
    Inside me, everything I thought I had sculpted until now transformed into an extension of canvas from the first touch of the brush.

  • UNIT-9910 A.LB. s1/1 ri

    UNIT-9910 A.LB. s1/1 ri

    White granite, Unhulled rice

    194.5×86×45.866 cm
    1000 kg

    I named my piece “Unit”, meaning the basic form beyond which it cannot be broken down further.
    ‘A.LB’ is an important abbreviation for the concept which led to this form. ‘s1/1’ is the scale, meaning that this work is actual size.
    ‘ri’ is an abbreviation for the thing that is stored inside, which, on this occasion, is one bale of unhulled rice.
    I do not think the space in which the unit is installed is important. Whether it’s in a thicket, like this time, or plopped down in the middle of a city crowded with people, or rolling around on a family’s dinner table, or standing alongside the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, or buried in grass on the African savannah…
    I could call it an object like the monolith envisioned by Stanley Kubrick.
    But it’s not as overpowering as the monolith.

  • CIVILIZED ZONE

    CIVILIZED ZONE

    Iron, Acrylic board, Television (5set),

    160×160×500 cm
    400 kg

    TV.camera, Famicom game, Antenna
    I feel that there is something in traditional rural scenery that keeps on changing.
    It’s not in the visible scenery, but rather, the change is going on in the hearts of we who look at it. That phenomenon is clearly visible in children who have not yet developed the ability to defend themselves from it, but the territory of the thoughts and feelings of individual humans is constantly being invaded by a whirl of stimulus, like television images and video games that are manufactured and pumped out by an enormous information industry, under urban civilization and the dominance of economics.
    This time, I attempted to express the confrontation between the rural scenery of Amabiki and the TV images that come into our living rooms.
    Countless television screens alone are emitting alien light In the dead center of rice fields with darkness pressing in. They stand in the scenery of late fall, as the mountains change color, amid a blizzard which clouds the mountains, forests and houses,.

  • Earth’s crust

    Earth’s crust -5White granite50×80×65 (h)cm

    Earth’s crust -7White granite160×90×120 (h)cm