Kenji Misawa
PROFILE
Emerging early in his career as a sculptor, Kenji Misawa began his artistic path in earnest after receiving an award at the First International Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture at the Hakone Open-Air Museum in 1969 and subsequently traveling across the world. In 1984, he moved to New York as a fellow of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs to train at Isamu Noguchi’s studio, later serving as a visiting artist at Harvard University in 1986. Over the course of his career, Misawa has created over one hundred public monuments, environmental designs, and gardens throughout Japan, establishing a distinctive formal universe through his deep engagement with public space.
At the core of Misawa’s practice lies a profound sensitivity to the materiality and physical presence of objects themselves. Coming of age alongside the emergence of Mono-ha in the late 1960s—studying alongside Nobuo Sekine and Kishio Suga while maintaining an ongoing dialogue with Lee Ufan—Misawa does not treat objects merely as raw materials for making form. His assemblage-based practice—combining disparate elements such as stone, iron, wood, and found objects to build new relationships while preserving their inherent differences and friction—remains consistent from his sculptures to his two-dimensional works. This approach, in which discordant materials are brought into balance through spatial composition and arrangement, is known as “the harmony of dissonance.”
In his recent two-dimensional works, which have evolved toward a more intuitive form of expression, Misawa fluidly moves between the boundaries of painting and sculpture. Along with affixing materials such as cassette tapes and charcoal directly onto the canvas, he utilizes unique methods such as “soft painting”—applying thick pigments directly from the tube without a brush to build distinct tactile layers. In particular, his New Horizon series, produced following his brain surgery and rehabilitation in 2019, reveals a raw, erupting internal energy and a striking vital force that seems to move between the thresholds of life and death.
As a sculptor who has pursued formal beauty and spatial tension across genres and artistic boundaries, and as a reborn, free-spirited painter who continues to challenge himself through his experience of illness, Misawa channels his extraordinary passion into his evolving body of work.
BIOGRAPHY
1945 Born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan
1968 Graduated from Tama Art University with an oil painting major
1984 Trained at Isamu Noguchi’s studio as a fellow of the Agency for Cultural Affairs
1986 Visiting Artist at Harvard University, USA
AWARDS
1969 The 1st International Exhibition of Modern Sculpture (The Hakone Open-Air Museum), Concours prize
1983 The 16th The Contemporary Art Exhibition, Tokyo Art Museum prize
1983 The 3rd Henry Moore Grand Prize Exhibition, Utsukushi-ga-hara Open-Air Museum prize
PAST EXHIBITIONS
Solo Exhibitions (Selected)：
2024 “BEAMS CULTUART presents Kenji Misawa: Transversal Abstraction” B GALLERY, Tokyo
1986 Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Group Exhibitions (Selected)：
2025 Two-person exhibition by Kenji Misawa and Jonathan Seliger “Material and Substance” Sho+1, Tokyo
2018 “LA Art Show” Los Angeles
2017 “LA Art Show” Los Angeles
2016 Hawaii international group exhibition, USA
2015 Hawaii international group exhibition, USA
2014 “EXPO Chicago” Shoichio, Chicago
1985 Jack Tilton Gallery, New York
OFFICIAL LINK