Shigeo Toya, best known for his chainsaw-hewn wood sculptures, has died. The Japanese artist began the Woods series in 1984, carving rough textures and incisions onto tall lumber, presenting several works closely gathered akin to a forest. Similarly, the series Twenty Eight Deaths, which Toya began producing in the 1980s, featured pairs of wooden blocks are stacked back-to-back, with cavities dug in on one side and holes burnt into each block on the other. A follow-up work saw the blocks stacked, each applied with acrylic paint mixed with ash from burned wood shavings.
Attracted to the totemic form and with a subtle monumentality – further works resembled spherical rocks, primeval plants and other organic species – Toya would say he aimed to reconstruct the physicality of sculpture, a materiality he thought dismantled in the currents of post-minimalism and mono-ha.
Born in a small village in northwestern Nagano Prefecture, his parents kept a small farm, He would recall later that while there were 30 households in our village, the settlement has since been deserted. ‘There is nothing there but graves’, he told Sculpture magazine in 2021. ‘We built secret forts out of cedar bark in the woods on the mountain slopes, and picked and ate all kinds of berries. We had a great time in the forest during the day, but at night, it was frightening and we were forbidden to enter. It was a mysterious and fantastical realm, completely different from when the sun was out, and I think that implanted a sense of the duality of nature in my mind.’
In 1988 Toya represented Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and went on to show at the Asia Pacific Triennial in 1993, and the Gwangju Biennale in 2000. He was the subject of an expansive survey show at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, in 2022–23.
