Koji Kamoji

Koji Kamoji (b. 1935 in Tokyo) is a painter and author of objects and installations - a native Japanese, and at the same time one of the most outstanding creators of the Polish avant-garde. After completing the Musashino Academy of Fine Arts in Tokyo (1958) he came to Poland in 1959, where he lives to this day; he received his diploma from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 1966 in the studio of Artur Nacht-Samborski.

His art is characterised by visual minimalism, the conscious elimination of superfluous things and the use of simple, easily available materials. Invited by Zbigniew Gostomski, in 1967 he made his debut at the Galeria Foksal in Warsaw - he arranged the space then in the likeness of a zen garden, strewing part of the gallery with gravel. He has been associated with Foksal to this day. His early „Pruszków paintings” - sparing reliefs with openings symbolising emptiness - and his white reliefs of meditative focus introduced into Polish art a geometry enriched with the philosophy of the Far East: haiku poetry, Taoism and Zen.

Kamoji's later installations are visual metaphors of man's relationship with nature, of silence and transience; he also created „instruments for carrying the voice of things”, listening to the quiet life of objects. As he said, his aim is not to build something new, but „to find and preserve the things we forget”. A laureate of the C.K. Norwid Award (1975) and the Jan Cybis Award (2015), he has been given retrospectives at, among others, the Zachęta in Warsaw („Silence and the Will to Live”, 2018) and the WATARI-UM in Tokyo.