Ser Serpas & Rafik Greiss – clockwork

Taka Ishii Gallery Kyobashi is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of the works of Ser Serpas and Rafik Greiss. For Serpas, who often invites another artist or performer to participate in her presentation, this will be the second time to collaborate with Greiss, following their exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, 2023.

This show will feature Serpas’ sculptural works, her new paintings, and Greiss’ photographic work and installations. The idea stems from their experience in cities where contractor trucks, loaded with used panels and discarded objects, passed by. Sometimes those objects seemed as though they had been thrown down from balconies, bringing about questions such as where they came from, where they were headed, and what the days might be like for the contractors.

Ser Serpas is a multidisciplinary artist, whose works revolve around sculpture, painting, poetry, and performance, unfolding in ways that seem to resist categorization. In recent years, she has created sculptural works by collecting discarded and found objects from the street, manipulating and reassembling them to reconfigure the tradition of the readymade. Attending to the apertures or points of connection inherent in these cast-off materials, and using the force of gravity, she constructs provisional sculptures. For this exhibition, objects including used everyday items are collected in Japan and reconstructed through the artist’s hand into new configurations.

Serpas’ monumental figure paintings suspended from the wall, which often depict torsos, draw on AI-generated images of human body as their source material. The images produced from data at times appear distorted, fractured by noise, or assembled from fragments as though pieced together from disparate uses. In this respect, they may be said to share qualities with the materials that Serpas employs in her sculptural works.

Serpas overlays a canvas onto another while the paint is still wet, rolls them together, and then separates them again. Through this process, paint transfers from one surface to the other, emerges as residual marks. While these marks remain like a kind of copy, they never appear as the repetition of an identical image. This phenomenon – where similar yet subtly altered forms recur – echoes the ways in which all things change over time and through the intervention of human hand.

Rafik Greiss works across photography, video, sculpture, and installation, exploring relationships between structure, narrative, and memory. His practice considers how systems of value shape perception, and how meaning is assigned, stabilized, and internalized through objects and images. In his photographic works, often conceived as two-dimensional sculptures, the image becomes a spatial and sculptural field rather than a document. Attention shifts away from objects as autonomous entities toward the relationships, tensions, and hierarchies that organize them.

The objects placed within the exhibition space are removed from their original contexts and subtly reconfigured. Through slight distortions and acts of displacement, familiar forms become unstable, prompting a reconsideration of what has been normalized through repetition. Emerging from a process of employing, dismantling, and reassigning existing elements, the works expose the structures－psychological and social－that condition how we see and interpret the world.

This exhibition is organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément.

Ser Serpas was born in Los Angeles in 1995. She received a Bachelor of Art at Columbia University, New York in 2017 and is mostly working between New York, Paris, and Tbilisi.

Rafik Greiss was born in Egypt in 1997. He earned BFA in Photography and Imaging, and Art History from New York University in 2020.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 11:00 – 19:00
Closed on Sun, Mon and National Holidays

Exhibition Duration 21.03. – 25.04.2026

www.takaishiigallery.com

Location:
Taka Ishii Gallery Kyobashi
Toda Building 3F, 1-7-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku
104-0031 Tokyo
Japan