my sky hole 85-9 my sky hole 85-9

Bukichi Inoue, who was an important figure in Japanese sculpture since he was in his thirties, spent ten years from his mid-forties in Berlin and Paris. It was in 1979, about half into his stay in Europe, that he started his series "my sky hole." He had already established his style with the earlier series of "Plus and Minus" and "Box," but with the new works, reflecting the new awareness he had gained in another culture, he attained a breakthrough into a grandeur style. Inoue has said, on the occasion he first showed "my sky hole 79," "I want a place where only I can hear the heartbeat of the earth, where only I can talk about the universe." The works in the series, which look quite different from one to another on the outside, can be epitomized, most of them, by these words. The stainless steel spheres of his works installed in Ueno and Hiroshima are mirrors which reflect the universe. And this "my sky hole 85-9" makes us hear the heartbeat of the earth. The twenty solid forms, each of which looks like a part of a disk, express the life energy of Mother Earth as if they were mountains created by incessant upheaval of the crust or bamboo shoots sprouting all at once after a rain.