Rafaël Rozendaal: GENEROSITY

Rafaël Rozendaal is a pioneering artist who embraces the internet as both a source of inspiration and a platform for creation. His website, which is filled with computer program-generated works that are both beautiful and thought-provoking, boasts 50 million accesses a year. Through a wide range of media including installations, tapestries, drawings, and lenticular paintings, as well as haiku and other word-based art, Rozendaal’s universe also extends beyond the internet and into physical space.

At one level, Rozendaal’s work can be understood as an interrogation of the status of art within digital and networked society. While his internet works include the owner’s name in the website’s title after being sold, they remain accessible to be viewed and appreciated by anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world. As we move deeper into a new era in the history of art, we have much to learn from Rozendaal’s astute insights into the ambiguity between public and private and the essence of the work of art in the age of post-mechanical reproducibility. GENEROSITY, the title of this exhibition, is a play on words that expresses the essence of Rozendaal’s work, which is made freely available to everyone everywhere.

The present exhibition will be the first solo presentation of Rozendaal’s work in a public art institution, not only in Japan, but anywhere in the world. Utilizing three of Towada Art Center’s exhibition galleries, Rozendaal’s unique universe will be presented through tapestries, haiku, and installations, offering visitors a valuable opportunity to see and experience what artistic creativity inspired by contemporary media looks and feels like.

Towada Art Center has been actively engaged in providing “new experiences” through art by supporting projects that are invested in expanding the horizons of what creativity will mean in the future. Our mission is to enrich our visitors’ daily and spiritual lives by organizing exhibitions by the world’s best and most cutting-edge artists, so as to provide a space facilitating novel and surprising experiences. The current project continues that mission by engaging with the internet, which has reshaped human imagination and our ways of creating and thinking over the past 30 years, through the work of Rafaël Rozendaal, an original and leading global figure in the field of internet art.

Rafaël Rozendaal (b. 1980) is a Dutch-Brazilian artist currently living and working in New York City.

Curator: Kodama Kanazawa (Independent Curator/Senior Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at Towada Art Center)

Financial Support from Mondriaan Fund and The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Tokyo

In Cooperation with Takuro Someya Contemporary Art, Nakagawa Chemical Co., Ltd and The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions; Special Support From The Chain Museum