Stairway

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Shigemura was active at the Shell Art Award, Japan Art Festival, The Hakone Open-Air Museum Grand Prize Exhibition, the Exhibition of the Contemporary Japanese Sculpture (UBE Biennale) and other exhibitions. His work includes designing the window displays for Wako in Ginza. Making free use of a technique named “katametaju (solidification),” in which the molds are made directly from the human body or a real object and cast in reinforced plastic, he developed expressions full of humor and satire.

If you look towards the left at the front entrance of the museum, you will see a woman with long hair about to climb the emergency stairs leading to the outdoor exhibition space while casting her eyes in this direction. If you go there, you will find that this woman covered in silver gray is made so realistically from the top of her head to the tips of her toes that you might even be able to see her pores. There is another woman in a woolen cap with a knapsack on her back walking down and yet another woman sitting on the landing with her elbows on her knees. Altogether three people form this oxidized silver group made for this stairway by Mitsuo Shigemura, the “katametaju” master of solidifying things exactly like the real thing. It is just like a real scene, but if you look carefully, there is an impossible trick to it. The mysterious bare tree in the shrubbery you come across if you walk around the museum building to the right of the front entrance is another work by the same artist that you may overlook if you pass by absentmindedly.

(dimensions)
168.0×45.5×48.0cm, 153.0×53.5×50.0cm, 96.0×42.0×81.5cm