K-Narf Color Photo Graffiti with Adhesive Tape Altered Street Art Photograph Collage

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K-narf, French (b. 1970)
Collage photo artwork (Graffiti Vans) (2011)
Tape-o-graph photography
Signed lower right, numbered 1/5
16 x 12 … Read more K-narf, French (b. 1970)
Collage photo artwork (Graffiti Vans) (2011)
Tape-o-graph photography
Signed lower right, numbered 1/5
16 x 12 7/8 inches

K-NARF was born in 1970 in Saint-Etienne, France and now lives in Tokyo.
K-NARF invented PHOTOGRAFFITI a contemporary way of making street photography that lead him to develop his singular Tape-o-Graphy technique. It involves the application of adhesive tape strips on developed photographs in order to manually process the photographs giving them a unique surface texture and extraordinary appearance.
Open to influences from street art and video, he uses the medium of photography as a toy to create and play. Both conceptual and experimental, definitely non-conventional, his work documents, recycles and collects the visual anachronisms of a world in a perpetual mutation. Through the years, K-narf often got support from key figures of the art world such as Teruo Kurosaki (Idee, Tokyo), Rotraut and Daniel Klein-Moquay (Yves Klein Estate), Joel Meyerowitz (pioneer of contemporary color photography), Jacques Attali (French writer), Olivier Gay (Architect & Art collector) and Yoichi Nakamuta (curator & Art producer). He collaborates on regular basic with established Art galleries including the Clic gallery in NYC, the 0fr gallery and Molin Corvo gallery in Paris or the Clear gallery in Tokyo. He moved back to Tokyo early 2014 and created his own gallery/atelier in the heart of the Nakameguro.
For the past decade K-narf has lived and exhibited worldwide including Japan, Australia, France, Singapore, USA and Italy. His exhibitions, often taking the form of ephemeral installations, are shown without distinction in a plant still in operation, an old theatre, Art galleries, Art biennales or an abandoned garage. His work has been shown atthe Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale (US), the Museum of Sydney, the Japan Foundation for the Arts, The Yves Klein Archives, Agnes B, Pierre Herme, Issey Miyake (Paris), the Clic gallery in NYC as well as a solo show during the Arles photo festival. K-NARF has exhibited his “photograffiti” installations in unlikely locations such as old cinemas, functioning plants, and abandoned garages. But he’s no street art snob. He has also shown his work at the French Embassy in Tokyo, the Museum of Sydney, and a photo festival in Arles, France. His career was launched back in 2001 when an artist named Teruo Kurosaki gave K-NARF — then a practicing architect — his first exhibition, The Red and Newspapers, at Sputnik PAD in Tokyo, Japan. Since then, he has been honing his creations and is seemingly primed to join the neo-pop ranks of cynical self-merchandising artists Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami.
K-Narf Photograffiti was exhibited at Clic Gallery NYC; kitschy photographs of amusement parks from the ’80s that he then altered with adhesive tape. French artist K-NARF transformed the concept of hatarakimono into a stunning series of works, photographing Japan’s everyday workers on the street in their work clothes. Using a portable background, he created an identical structure for all of the images. He posed bus drivers, souvenir shop cashiers, and udon cooks on a small pedestal in front of a gray background. The result is stunning: K-NARF has created a multi-faceted monument to the workers. With the HATARAKIMONO, K-NARF picks up right in the famous footsteps of of photographers Felix Thiollier, August Sander or Irving Penn. K-NARF & SHOKO go against the grain and shows Japan’s traditional workers in their everyday outfits without special clothing or make-up. They do not use filters to iron out the wrinkles in their suits or faces. When selecting the unusual format for the project, the artist took inspiration from an old photo art tradition. The portraits are reminiscent of the carte de visite, a kind of small photographic calling card from the 1860s that helped photography make major breakthroughs in popularity. Knarf describes himself as an artist pretending to be a photographer. He is self-taught in the art and craft of photography. As a 15 year-old, he installed a makeshift darkroom in his parents’ bathroom to develop his first black-and-white photos. In 1996, after he acquired one of the first digital camera, he started a new approach to photography blending up-coming technologies together with manual processing techniques. He had his first exhibition in Tokyo in 2001 and in 2005 IdN, Hong-Kong publisher, released NEO-PHOTO a book dedicated to his work. K-NARF met SHOKO in Tokyo in 2014, they started working together in 2016 with the HATARAKIMONO PROJECT. It was first presented in 2018 at the Kyotographie International Photography Festival. This work owes a debt to Arte Povera and Bricolage a French form of collage (ala Tom Sachs),

BIO
1970 Born in Saint-Etienne, France
2001 move to Tokyo, first exhibition in Japan at SPUTNIK-IDÉE in Tokyo
2006 invited to be one of the 40 first members of the prestigious “HP Influencers program”. (He is the youngest member on the side with MAGNUM photographers and other established photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz)
2007 solo exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles international photo festival
2008 invents PHOTOGRAFFITI as a new street photography approach and start pasting them in the streets of
Tokyo, Paris, Milan, Rome, NYC
2010 starts making his first large format TAPE-O-GRAPHS
2011 first exhibition in the USA, CLIC Gallery NYC
2014 move back his studio to Tokyo and meet SHOKO
2016 Began working on the HATARAKIMONO project together with japanese artist, Shoko Yamaguchi
2018 HATARAKIMONO PROJECT book co-published with DILECTA Editions, Paris
2019 started the “PLASTÉONTOLOGY PROJECT” in collaboration with TARA OCEAN FOUNDATION (Agnès b)
2020 K-NARF & SHOKO moved their studio from Tokyo to Kyoto See less