Hidetoshi Nagasawa

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Hidetoshi Nagasawa was born in Manchuria in 1940. Following the 1945 Soviet invasion, his family set off on a long and difficult voyage to Japan, which took them a year and a half. Graduating with the degree in in Architecture and Design in 1963, he found work as an architect after joining the Gutaj Group. In 1966 he married Kimiko Ezaki, and only a few months later he set off on his bicycle, heading west. In August 1967 he arrived in Milan, where he was forced to stop as his bicycle was stolen. He found a studio in the working-class district of Sesto San Giovanni and came into contact with a group of artists including Enrico Castellani, Luciano Fabro, Mario Nigro, Antonio Trotta and Athos Ongaro. In 1972 he participated in the Biennale in Venice for the first time. 

In the eighties, Nagasawa’s work grew in scale, leading him to create spaces on the borderline between sculpture and architecture; his works also became anti-gravitational, capable of challenging the laws of physics and the force of gravity. In the late 80s and the 90s he travelled the world to participate in major national and international exhibitions: from Kassel, for the ninth edition of Documenta in 1992, to the Biennale in Venice in 1993. Nagasawa establishes the perfect balance between eastern and western art, and his works are metaphors of travel in time and space, constantly striving to achieve a structural balance between weight and lightness. He has created numerous outdoor permanent installations, designed in and for a specific site and created on location, in an intense dialogue between environment and sculpture, between artwork and space. His works are included in the collections of the Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp, and a number of Japanese museums exhibit his work (National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima; Municipality of Adachi-ku, Tokyo; Contemporary Art Center, Mito). Nagasawa died in 2018.