TOKYO.- Fergus McCaffrey will present DIVISIBLE, an exhibition of recent sculpture by Paul Wallach (b. 1960), opening September 12 at its Tokyo gallery — his first exhibition in Asia. The artist will be present at the opening.
Following a celebrated return to New York in 2025 after three decades shown largely in Europe and more than thirty years working resolutely from Paris, Wallach has built one of the more singular sculptural practices of his generation. It is a body of work that moves fluently between the intimacy of a small, hand-worked wall piece and the permanent, outdoor scale of a public installation, without ever losing the same exacting, personal logic. His is a voice that has grown in influence while never asking to be noticed — a discreet, essential presence in the wider field of sculpture today.
To divide, for Wallach, is a way of deciding, and just as often, a way of questioning. Each work begins with a cut, a joint, a gap, and ends by holding what it has divided together. Nothing is planned in advance: there are no preparatory drawings, only a sequence of decisions taken directly in the material, each one left standing in what follows. The process stays legible on the surface — additions, subtractions, doubts and second attempts, never sanded away — so that the finished piece still carries the process. That record is what makes the work human: not a symbol of the maker's presence, but its literal trace.
The exhibition unfolds along three formal axes, made visible through its own scenography rather than announced by it. Across all three, space itself is treated as a material: each work asks the viewer's own body to move, to circle, to test, so that looking becomes something closer to walking.
Wallach's connection to Japan began more than forty-five years ago, when he first traveled to Kyoto. He called that first trip a transformative experience — the sense that in Japan, nothing goes unnoticed, that every detail, seen or not, matters. Something of that instinct has run through his work ever since, close to what is known in Japan as ma (space) that carries as much weight as the object it surrounds.
The first approach centers on reflection, and its refusal. In non lieu (2022) and Heir (2026) mirrors are set at an angle that reflects a floor, a wall, an absence, never the viewer's own face. As critic Ann C. Collins wrote in the Brooklyn Rail, viewers “do not see themselves, and, according to his mirror, do not exist at all.”
The second is built on expansion. Give and Taken (2026), Since The Day Before (2022), and Neither Nor (2026) each grow from a single point of contact — a joint, a knot, a plane where wood first meets wood — rather than being built toward a fixed, predetermined silhouette. From that point, form accumulates as a sequence of pushes and counter-pushes, one element straining against the next, until the work settles into tension rather than rest. Nothing is symmetrical or centered; nothing offers one privileged angle. Circling each piece, the eye keeps travelling past its physical edge, as though the sculpture were caught mid-expansion — continuity without a legible beginning or end.
Wallach’s third instinct is to graft and mend his intimate surfaces — wood, canvas, pencil, thread and paint. Divisible (2017), the wall relief lending the show its name, refers most closely to painting here. Its title carries an American echo: “indivisible” is the word the Pledge of Allegiance uses for the nation, a unity which this attentive work confronts rather than confirms.
Wallach's forms stay open, their argument still visible in the object, rare, and for that reason difficult to look away from. There is a quiet paradox at the heart of these works. They look provisional — held together by little more than a joint, a string and a decision. Their strength is adaptive rather than rigid: each piece finds its own balance instead of resisting it, and it is that same apparent fragility — not despite it, but through it — that makes the work so striking to stand in front of. There is something haunting in this too: the works stay just unresolved enough that the viewer's own presence is drawn in to complete them, an unspoken invitation to stay a while longer than expected.
With much contemporary sculpture designed on screen and executed by machine, Wallach's hand-carved and hand-joined sculpture practice reads less as nostalgia than as an argument: that a decision made and left visible is a strength, and that what a sculpture can still show, uniquely, is a person having made up their mind.
Paul Wallach lives and works in Paris. Solo exhibitions include the Muse d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Saint-tienne; the Domaine de Kerguhennec, Bignan; the Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and Fergus McCaffrey, New York (2025). In 2018, he completed a monumental outdoor installation, Down to the Ground, closing the Kunstprojekt Krauthgel cycle initiated by the Salzburg Foundation. His work is held in the collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum Liaunig, Neuhaus; and the Skulpturenpark Kln, Cologne.
