Izima Kaoru Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Izima Kaoru was born in Kyoto in 1954. He lives and works in Tokyo. Poetic and disturbing, bloody and seductive images. Read the full biography

Izima Kaoru was born in Kyoto in 1954. He lives and works in Tokyo. Poetic and disturbing, bloody and seductive images. Since 1993, the Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru has been staging works of sophisticated violence and enchanting horror. Landscapes with a corpse is the title of his project. He invites actresses and models to reveal their fantasies of the perfect death to him: above all, he asks them what branded clothes they would like to wear at the moment of their death. Thus the photos that portray the scene of a crime (or a natural death) do not refer to something fatal and irreversible, but to a sort of elegant and highly aestheticized ceremony. Kaoru's images always have a filmic structure: the long shots with bodies that seem to disappear into the environment alternate with others that put the wide-eyed gaze of the victims in the foreground. Yet there is never a real story, only clues, suspicions, allusions: the unfolding of a story whose mystery will not be revealed to us. And the same glassy eyes of the models no longer open to anything or anyone.