Soshiro Matsubara
Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
20 October 2023 – 14 January 2024
Set within an idyllic landscape surrounded by trees and lakes, the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin formed an ideal backdrop for Soshiro Matsubara’s installation inspired by the legacy of French artist Bruno Pélassy (1966-2003). Pélassy, a multi-faceted artist whose small but diverse oeuvre embraced drawing, sculpture and fashion design, contracted HIV at the age of 21. The diagnosis was to shape his work, aesthetic, and approach to subjects such as illness, infection, ostracism and death, and tragically cut short his life at the age of 38.
Like Pélassy, Matsubara is of Asian background but works in a Western environment. For this small group exhibition, he offered his own interpretation and response to certain themes in Pélassy’s work, from intimacy and his fascination with vulnerability, to the interweaving of the historical and the fictional, of reality and dream-like states. Matsubara’s work occupied one of the large rooms of the house.
Soshiro Matsubara (born 1980 in Hokkaido, Japan, lives and works in Vienna, Austria) is an artist whose installations and sculptural works often find their starting point in images from old magazines and objects from antique shops, which are then reinterpreted and used in a variety of different ways. His work has recently been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Croy Nielsen in Vienna, and at solo exhibitions in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo. Matsubara is co-director of XYZ collective, Tokyo, and in 2017 he founded the antique store House of Matsubara. This is his first collaboration with Phileas.
