Tadao Ando & Mono-ha. The Five Elements

The Pinault Collection celebrates Tadao Ando, the architect behind its three museums, at Punta della Dogana. Combining Ando’s work with collector François Pinault’s passion for art, this exhibition places the architect’s photographs in dialogue with major works by the Japanese Mono-ha movement (“School of Things”). Both legendary and little known, this movement remains one of the best-kept secrets of the late 1960s avant-garde. Today, the Pinault Collection holds one of the most remarkable collections of Mono-ha works outside Japan.

Focusing on the photographs Tadao Ando takes of his own architectural creations, the exhibition sheds light on a lesser-known aspect of his practice: the architect’s longstanding exploration of the relationships between image, architecture and the experience of space. Presented as prints and slide projections within the austere architectural setting of Punta della Dogana, this photographic collection reveals Tadao Ando’s fascination with the changing qualities of light, the interplay of shadows and the passage of time.

Five elements, which also happen to be Tadao Ando’s preferred materials, provide a guiding thread throughout the exhibition: air (emptiness and the concept of ma, the space between things); earth (context and history); water (fluidity); fire (the transformation of glass or metal); and concrete, the material through which the architect gives form to abstraction.