SCAI The Bathhouse is one of the best galleries in Tokyo, not only for hosting great exhibitions and artists but also for its own architecture, having been created in a former public bath in the Ueno area.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola On September 7 many people gathered at the gallery, including the artist Mariko Mori herself, for the vernissage of the new exhibition 'Flat Stone'.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola The eponymous central 'Flat Stone' piece is apparently inspired by an old tradition of making stone circles in order to celebrate the winter solstice. Mori's twenty-two stones are not real ones. These stones are instead hyper-real stones, made out of incredibly smooth ceramic.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola Mariko Mori (right) during the vernissage was incredibly kind with all the guests, talking and explaining about the works to them, including Johnnie Walker (left).Photo: Maurizio Mucciola Mariko Mori explaining to a guest about the ceramic 'hyper stones'.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola Photo: Maurizio Mucciola The artist entertaining guests, with her paintings and drawings in the background.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola A visitor staring at one of the paintings exhibited in the first room of the gallery.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola The paintings had very subtle three dimensional elements made by the paint, which had a powerful effect against the white canvas and the white background of the gallery walls.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola All the painting motifs felt both like a sort of universe, like a planet or a galaxy, as well as being very cellular or atomic. They created a close relation between two incredibly different scales.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola A planet, or a mono-cellular organism…Photo: Maurizio Mucciola Detail of 'Parallel Brane painting I'.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola Detail of 'Parallel Brane painting I'.Photo: Maurizio Mucciola The gallery filled with visitors enjoying the wine, the nice temperature of a September evening in Ueno, and, of course, admiring the artworks...Photo: Maurizio Mucciola
Born in Italy in 1977, studied architecture in Milan (and Lisbon for a year). After working in different architecture and landscape design firms he decided to go back to school and spent a year and a half at the architecture school of Columbia University in New York, while at the same time collaborating and shooting photos for "Volume Magazine". Then one year in Rotterdam at the Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan Architecture before he finally landed in Tokyo in January 2009 to work at Kengo Kuma & Associates Architects. Architecture really absorbs most of its time, but sometimes he likes to take in the city and go around art galleries and museums, and try to catch Tokyo through a Nikon camera.
