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)

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

Although the moon is the celestial body closest to Earth, we are unable to see one of its sides.

Distance is not merely physical; it is also a gap produced by the ways in which we perceive.

Simon Patterson (b. 1967) has been active in London since the 1980s as a member of the Young British Artists, and has attracted attention as a significant conceptual artist who replaces 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, where the sequence of names—symbolizing human achievement—simultaneously creates a light distance as a citation of form. In The Great Bear, a subway map is transformed into another system, and in Name Painting, a portrait is constituted through “names.” In these works, the memory and structures that support the image come to the fore rather than the image itself.

Positioned at a time when information was rapidly becoming 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 distinctive and striking position.

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

This exhibition centers on Patterson’s works while presenting, alongside them, the practices of five Japanese artists whom the gallery has continuously introduced.

Shinji Ogawa (b. 1959), an artist who was also active in Nagoya during the same period as Patterson, will re-present Reading (2008). This photographic work, grounded in a conceptual framework, expresses time and space simultaneously, and is positioned here in dialogue from a Japanese perspective.

Junryo Yokoyama (b. 1982), Daigo Omura (b. 1984), Shota Hanaki (b. 1988), and Hinata Ogawa (b. 2000) will each present newly produced works.

Their practices derive portraits, images, distance, and time from thought and relationships, realized through their respective methods.

While their materials and approaches differ, a clear commonality can be found in their orientation toward the structures underlying 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 move beyond something, but rather poses the question of how much distance one can take from one’s current position. By shifting our focus from physical to mental distance, this exhibition attempts to reconsider—through art—the structural practices of the period around the 1990s and their transformation into contemporary modes of thought.