Rinko Kawauchi – Sheets

(spreads courtesy of Kominek)

Artist: Rinko Kawauchi
Title: Sheets
Publisher: Kominek books
Year: 2013
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Rinko Kawauchi’s work, instantly recognisable, is more often than not a beautifully melancholic mediation on daily life. Sheets, her latest publication, brings together work from the last ten years and presents them anew in the form of contact sheets.

Kawauchi’s work is often anything but ‘still’ so the sequential nature of the contact sheets complements the fluidity of each of the pictures.  From curtains blowing in the breeze to fish scrambling in ponds, and from fireworks illuminating the night sky to babies crying as thunderstorms crackle and jet planes fly overhead, motion, on differing scales, has always been central to Kawauchi’s work.

Read now as a whole, new and more complete narratives are encouraged through the arrangement of single images and whole contact prints. The overall effect is to increase the already thick atmosphere and this highlights the extraordinary consistency and skill to be found in Kawauchi’s method.

To see the pattern of her work as a whole is fascinating, and the extra narrative space afforded by the layouts is something to be savoured – both for her existing admirers as well as for anyone new to her work.

Beautifully produced with numerous gatefold spreads, Sheets is an excellent addition to the already long list of highly impressive books made by Kawauchi over the past decade.