Yuji Agematsu

Since 1985 Yuji Agematsu has collected objects as he walks the streets of New York. Here wall mounted panels provide him with a structure within which to improvise and compose such objects, as–is. Each panel is arranged without a plan, forms emerge or grow through working, and later the artist goes back to secure them in place.

Agematsu is no stranger to working this way, his daily artworks, known as “zips,” are always an improvisation held fast later. The shapes and moods of these panels came together in quick spurts during a summer of great dismay in New York, but their route to life occurred over long, devotional periods of time, as some of the objects have been in Agematsu’s possession since the late 1990s. Others were collected only this summer. Objects have their shape and weight, their colour, and beyond this a dimension for which there is no scale, their importance. Yuji Agematsu’s new panels, about which we know so little, belong to an unbroken improvisational exercise he began in the 1980s. These works are then new and old. “New territory,” as Phillip Guston once remarked, “has to have recognition in it too…it has to be new and old at the same time as if that image has been in you a long time but you’ve never seen it before.”