Sign: Tetsuya Umeda

Signs are not necessarily sent by anyone. Something that was never sent to anyone can still be received as a sign. And sometimes, we find ourselves responding to it without ever knowing what it was a sign of.
For this exhibition, I want to try staging an "unguided tour" in a gallery consisting of just one room. Taking whatever is there as a sign, the body stays where it is, while only the tour moves forward.

Tetsuya Umeda

Ota Fine Arts is pleased to announce Sign, a solo exhibition by Tetsuya Umeda. This marks the artist's first exhibition at our Piramide Building space in fourteen years, following Waiting Room in 2012. Umeda’s work has always been built from what a place already contains, and out of what is already happening there. A sound rings out, light falls, people are in the room together. That alone can be enough for something previously unnoticed to become visible. An installation is developed within a single gallery. Not only are the elements newly introduced, but the space itself is drawn into its composition.

Umeda describes this exhibition as an "unguided tour". Whereas his previous tours carried the audience from place to place, here there is no route to follow and no "sign" to wait for. Without leaving a single space, visitors find their thoughts drawn elsewhere, while time itself continues to move forward.