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untitled
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Year: 2024
Medium: Urethane paint on aluminium, coating
Dimensions: 258 x 106 x 110 cm (101 1/2 x 41 3/4 x 43 1/4 in.)
Acquired from PERROTIN, 2025
Kato has long worked in sculpture. Recently, he has presented large-scale human-like forms, or “hitogata,” cast in aluminium. Sculptures are commonly cast by pouring molten metal into a mould made from the artist’s model in clay, plaster, or another material. Here, however, the cast forms derive from natural stones, rough and weighty as if freshly split, their wedge marks still exposed.
Kato stacks four large aluminium stones like a traditional stone lantern: from top to bottom, the head, chest, abdomen and arms, and legs of a standing figure. The face, hands, and feet are painted on the surfaces rather than modelled in three dimensions. From one side, the full body appears aligned; from another, it appears misaligned and strangely distorted.
Looking up from the figure’s feet reveals the underside of its chin and neck, where wedge scars seem to sever the neck from the chest. As in some of Kato’s paintings, the hitogata is not a continuous body but separate parts seemingly fused together. The stacked stones make this segmentation—like the seam between two joined canvases—especially visible. These divisions have an almost terrifying immediacy, marking the fusion of natural forms with Kato’s imagination.
Kato has long sought to give his art the same intensity as natural objects. Beauty, ugliness, pleasure, fear—what people perceive in natural objects and works of art varies from person to person. Permanently installed at the museum as public art, this work will likewise prompt dialogue and reflection among passersby.
Commissioned by Sculpture Milwaukee, the work was displayed at Museum Center Park in Milwaukee from June 2024 to October 2025 before entering the museum’s collection.
Exhibition History
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Currently on view
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Past exhibitions
