REI NAITO Colour Beginning

For a number of years, Japanese artist Rei Naito (born in Hiroshima in 1961) has been considering in a group of works titled Colour Beginning the phenomenon of colour and its sensory perception. As part of her artistic approach, in her minimalist works colour is barely visible at first glance and unravels to the human eye only upon closer inspection. In 2023, in her first exhibition at Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, she pursued this complex inquiry by juxtaposing and bringing into dialogue watercolour drawings in pairs, which spoke to each other.

In her current spatial installation for the Rotunda of the Pinakothek der Moderne, Rei Naito intensified her preoccupation with the artist medium of colour and its effect on its audience. Seemingly playfully she succeeds, with the precision characteristic of all her works, in transforming the incredible expanse of the Rotunda delicate, sphere-shaped coloured bodies of wool into a weightless immaterial existence and in making colour itself perceptible beyond a burdensome iconographic context.

The resulting stirring experience in the Rotunda was preceded by one year of meticulous planning, comprehensive studies of colours and two trial installations. Rei Naito created an intricate choreography of individual colours and relational positions for the sixty small-format coloured bodies she made herself. With all this, she invites us to let the space-conquering and ephemeral symphony of colours impress its effect on us and to let our thoughts wander.

With her Rotunda Project Colour Beginning, Rei Naito attains the unimaginable. In terms of painting, she frees the colour from the canvas and paints the light-flooded expanse with her colour dots. For a few weeks only, she offers us the opportunity in this apparently weightless space of colour to have a transcendental experience that begins with colour.

Rei Naito designed the low chairs along the columns especially for the Rotunda. They invite us to sit down and to take the time to immerse ourselves in this play of colours.

Supported by PIN. Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne e.V.