HIDETOSHI NAGASAWA (1940–2018)

The Japanese architect, sculptor, and performance artist Hidetoshi Nagasawa has died, reports Mariacristina Ferraioli of the Artribune. Nagasawa had been sick for about a year. He passed away in Milan, where he had lived since 1968.

The artist was a maker of objects and experiences that were “characterized by a balance between Orient and Occident,” wrote critic Jole de Sanna in a review of an exhibition of the artist’s sculpture at the Galleria Valeria Belvedere in Milan for the summer 1988 issue of Artforum. “His work is about the process of abstraction—the transformation of an idea from one realm to another—and how the particular ingredients and methods of construction determine the meaning(s) to be construed from the form(s) that it is given. Like two halves, placed in his right and left hands, meditation and plasticity intersect in his work, but always remain divisible: a work matters in terms of what it allows one to observe and to imagine about the reasons behind life.”

Nagasawa took part in more than five editions of the Venice Biennale, starting in 1972, and his art was featured in the Documenta quinquennial of 1992. He cofounded, with de Sanna and the sculptor Luciano Fabro, the Casa degli artisti, or Artists’ House, a space for exhibitions, events, and artist residencies that played a fundamental role in the Milanese art scene. Nagasawa was also a professor and taught sculpture at the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.