Toshikatsu Endo

Toshikatsu Endo (b. 1950, Gifu, Japan) is widely known for his monumental sculptures and dynamic interventions that transform institutional spaces, urban and natural landscapes alike through the use of elemental materials such as earth, water, and fire. A leading figure of Japan’s so-called ‘post-Mono-ha’ generation since the 1970s, Endo probes existential and anthropological questions of human origin, life and death, religion and sacrifice, while reconciling the narrative and mystical qualities of his work with global Minimalism’s perceptual gestalts and fidelity to materials. Through his distinctive practice, the artist has continually returned to motifs that embrace the void at their center, such as circles and boats, alluding to communal formation and its desolate core. For Endo, “a circle is charged with a perpendicular force”—a transcendental, metaphysical energy that bridges the horizon on which it rests, representing the present and the everyday, with the stratified realm of death and communal memory buried deep beneath. The void within the circle, in turn, continuously absorbs and exudes intangible forces arising from a community’s collective subconscious, ultimately transforming into a portal to the community’s spiritual space-time, where the conceptual and the corporeal, the living and the departed, quietly converge.