Into Space

In the Marais district, natural light fills David Zwirner’s newly renovated Parisian home. Within a large, open room, a skylight overlayed with horizontal beams spans the entire ceiling—part of the building’s original 1891 design, it was preserved by New York’s Selldorf Architects and the Parisian firm Studio Razavi during the gallery’s summer 2024 renovations. An elongated, eye-level platform stretches across the entire length of the room, just wide enough to carry dozens of ceramics by Shio Kusaka.

The Japanese-born and Los Angeles-based artist’s eponymous exhibition marks her first formal showing in Paris and her second presentation with the gallery. Inspired by the ancient pottery of Mesolithic Japan, quantum mechanics, and the celestial themes of Star Trek, Kusaka’s playful vessels are rhythmic and textured. The works encompass elements of human technologies past and future, as well as the natural world. One sculpture, (spaceship 1), 2024, stands perpendicular upon small wings mimicking a rocketship; remote control-like buttons extend along its white body to an open circular window. Others are adorned with black etchings of soundwaves, while some bear patterns and symbols reminiscent of ancient codes. In a dimly lit room, four large paper lanterns––crafted in collaboration with the company Kojima Shōten––hover over the floor like spaceships beaming down.  

While Kusaka works in series, ideas around repetition, tradition and technique, and how her works engage with the environment appear throughout her practice. This is not the first time the artist has engaged with the ceiling and floor as modes of showing her work. For her first solo exhibition with David Zwirner in 2022, “one light year,” she positioned her ceramics on reflective copper plates in a line on the ground of the gallery’s 519 West 19th Street location in New York. Today in Paris, Kusaka continues to develop her unique style rooted in both tradition and visions of the future as she explores the relationship between space, viewer, and artwork. 

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“Shop Kusaka” is on view through October 5, 2024 at David Zwirner Paris at 108, rue Vieille du Temple 75003, Paris.