ZURICH.- Mai 36 Galerie is presenting 𝒾𝓃𝒻𝑒𝓇𝓃𝑜, Hiroki Tsukuda’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening in September.
Conceived as a constellation of newly produced two-dimensional and sculptural works, the exhibition draws viewers into a world in which distinctions between the real and the fabricated, the digital and the handmade, begin to collapse. Tsukuda’s images seem at once excavated from an abandoned past and transmitted from a near future: speculative records of a civilisation looking back at the conditions of its own undoing.
The exhibition brings together hybrid two-dimensional works—each combining monotype, drawing, photography and screen-printed acrylic—with a group of Plexiglas boxes containing what the artist calls “Cross Figures”. Assembled from found objects, readymade parts and constructed imagery, these small, toy-like figures appear as antiheroes, cyborgs or unidentified survivors. Often accompanied by a sidekick and a miniature gestural painting—itself set into a tiny acrylic frame—they inhabit scenarios somewhere between a museum display, a film set and a private room. Each seems to carry a relic, fragment or piece of knowledge from another time.
Tsukuda’s two- and three-dimensional works share the same logic of collage. In the works on paper, collage becomes a passage through successive material and technological states. For the monotype based works, the artist scratches patterns into an aluminium plate, paints it with oil colour and thinner, and runs it through a press. He then works into the unique impression with pencil, charcoal, water-soluble coloured pencil, oil pastel and acrylic ink, using brushes and airbrush. This physical layer is combined with a digital collage made from scans of his drawings, Illustrator-generated shapes, his own photographs and images found online. Printed directly onto the acrylic glazing, it hovers above the paper; light entering the narrow interval casts shifting shadows.
The resulting works resist any stable account of how they were made. Marks that appear digitally generated may have been drawn by hand, while photographic fragments lose their documentary authority and become fictional. Although Tsukuda’s visual language and printing processes suggest reproduction, each work remains a unique original. Digital tools and painstaking handwork continually exchange roles, testing our confidence in what an image can reveal about its own origin.
The compositions recall scientific diagrams, anatomical studies, fictional magazine covers and film stills from the science fiction of the late 1970s and 1980s. Mechanised worlds collide with biomorphic forms, fragments of bodies and unstable architectures, as well as video games, which offered a form of cyberspace before the internet reached the Japanese countryside. Yet the futures once encountered as fiction now feel increasingly close to the conditions of the present.
Surrealism offers another point of orientation. Tsukuda’s improvised marks draw upon automatism, while his constructed image-worlds relate to Japanese Surrealist Harue Koga, whose deliberately assembled absurdity departed from André Breton’s emphasis on the subconscious. Tsukuda moves between these positions: allowing images to arise intuitively while consciously engineering their collisions. This ability to see one form inside another reaches back to his childhood in Kagawa, where he discovered “Thomassons”—Genpei Akasegawa’s term for architectural remnants that have lost their function yet acquired a strange presence: stairs leading nowhere, redundant doorways and abandoned pedestals.
Tsukuda’s deep affinity with European painting is equally present. Several works pay explicit homage to Francis Bacon, recalling his isolated bodies, spatial enclosures and compressed psychological intensity without quoting them directly. Elsewhere, gestural passages and hermetic, calligraphy-like signs evoke the postwar exchanges between European Art Informel, lyrical abstraction and the Japanese avant-garde. Georges Mathieu’s rapid, calligraphic painting and his dialogue with Gutai are part of this history, as is critic Michel Tapié’s movement between European and Japanese artistic circles. Yves Klein—later a founding figure of Nouveau Réalisme—spent formative years in Japan studying judo. These crossings suggest that Tsukuda does not simply combine separate European and Japanese traditions; he enters an existing, decades-long traffic of gestures, materials and ideas, and redirects it towards the technological and ecological anxieties of the present.
This sensitivity to the latent charge of existing things connects Tsukuda’s practice to Mono-ha. Rather than treating materials as passive matter, he is interested in the presence they already possess and in the resonance produced by their encounter with other things and the surrounding space. The “Cross Figures” condense this approach: their identities emerge through selection, displacement and combination. Like his larger installations, they translate digital collage into physical space.
Behind the seductive density of inferno lies a darker proposition. Tsukuda describes the central themes of his work as “record” and “warning.” His images move through the present, past and near future as though viewed retrospectively from a much more distant time. Natural and nuclear disasters, the long aftermath of economic expansion, resource extraction and a wider political and ecological instability enter the work without being illustrated literally. They appear instead as accumulating pressure: something already unfolding at the edge of perception.
The artist recently left Tokyo, where he had lived for thirty years, for Hokkaido. Working alone and engaging more directly with each piece has brought a newly emotional and chromatic register to the work. Inferno emerges from this closeness. Its images are warnings, but also acts of attention—messages sent across time, asking what traces a culture leaves behind and whether we can still recognise the signs placed before us. In Tsukuda’s formulation, they might be read as an account discovered after the event: “This is how we met our end.”
Text by Samuel Leuenberger
Hiroki Tsukuda's (b. 1978 in Kagawa, lives and works in Hokkaido, Japan) work was featured in the 8th
Yokohama Triennale (2024). He has mounted solo exhibitions at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2025); Petzel, New York (2024); Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo (2022); Petzel, New York (2020); Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (2019); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2018); and Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (2017), among others. His works were also included in group shows such as Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2019, KINDL – Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin 2018, Brandenburgischer Kunstverein Potsdam e.V. 2015, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2012, Le Magasin – Centre National d’art Contemporain de Grenoble, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and Sprengel Museum Hannover, all 2011, among others.
Hiroki Tsukuda is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mori Art Museum, Japan; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, Vienna; the Jean Pigozzi Foundation, Geneva, among others.
