ARTISTS

Simon Patterson 小川 信治 / Shinji Ogawa 横山 惇亮 / Junsuke Yokoyama 大村 大悟 / Daigo Omura 花木 彰太 / Shota Hanaki 小川 日夏太 / Hinata Ogawa

INFORMATION

Dates | April 11 (Sat) – April 25 (Sat), 2026

Venue | Atsuhiko Suematsu Gallery(Parkside Six B1C, 9-5-12 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo)

Hours | 11:00–18:00 (Open every day during the exhibition period)

At Atsuhiko Suematsu Gallery, we are pleased to present Further Than, a group exhibition featuring six artists.

The moon, although the celestial body closest to Earth, still has a side we are unable to see.Distance is not merely a matter of physical space; it is also a gap produced by the way we perceive.

Simon Patterson has been active in London since the 1980s as a member of the Young British Artists, and has gained recognition as a significant conceptual artist who reconfigures existing systems of classification and signs. This exhibition presents works Patterson produced from the 1990s through the 2000s.

In In Orbit, the names of astronauts are arranged like film credits; the sequence of names, symbolizing human achievement, simultaneously creates a light conceptual distance through its citation of form. In The Great Bear, a subway map is transformed into an alternative system, while in Name Painting, portraiture is constituted through “names.” In these works, the memory and structures that support images are foregrounded over the images themselves.

Spanning a period in which information rapidly became networked, Patterson’s act of fixing essential structures such as names and classifications onto large canvases in deliberately simple forms appears, from today’s perspective, to occupy a striking and singular position.

In particular, Patterson’s “Name Painting” series has been continuously introduced in Japan since the 1990s by galleries such as Koji Ogura Gallery and Roentgenwerke. These presentations resonated strongly with the interest in conceptual art and text-based practices in Japan at the time.

This exhibition places Patterson’s works at its core, alongside the practices of five Japanese artists whom the gallery has continuously presented.

Shinji Ogawa, who was also active in Nagoya during the same period as Patterson, will present Reading (2008) once again. This work, a conceptually driven photographic piece that expresses time and space simultaneously, engages in dialogue from a Japanese perspective.

Junsuke Yokoyama, Daigo Omura, Shota Hanaki, and Hinata Ogawa will each present newly produced works.

Their practices derive portraiture, images, distance, and time from thought and relational structures, each employing their own methods.

While their materials and approaches differ, a clear commonality can be found in their orientation toward the structures that lie behind visible images.

As the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested, culture always has both a front and a back. Behind what we see lies a network of relations that often escapes conscious awareness.

“Further than” does not simply mean to go beyond something; rather, it asks how much distance we can take from the position we currently occupy. By shifting our attention from physical to mental distance, this exhibition attempts to reconsider—through art—the structural practices around the 1990s alongside contemporary modes of reconfiguring thought.