Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1950. While influenced by Minimalism and the Mono-ha movement, which radically questioned the principles of art from the 1960s to the 1970s, he maintained a critical attitude toward these ideas and set out to go beyond their horizons, producing works that use fired wood, water, earth, metal, and other materials, with “circularity” and “hollowness” at the core of their forms. In the 1980s, he exhibited at Documenta and the Venice Biennale, and toured in Scandinavia and the U.K. He is internationally acclaimed as one of Japan’s leading sculptors.

In Endo’s works, which aim to restore narrative in art, motifs such as boats, barrels, and coffins evoke ancient cultures and mythical tales, while primitive elements such as water and fire awaken in us the sense of life and death that lies at the root of human life. The overwhelming materiality and size of the work directly affects our physical senses, leading the viewer to a higher dimension of awe and ecstasy, and to a sense of life and death as one.

The surface of EPITAPH’s material is scorched black by fire, and the cavity inside is filled with water. The structural element of these works appear before our eyes as extremely stable materials that cannot be reduced any further, evoking a sense of connection to the earth through the material. Endo’s works attempt to draw us into the invisible structure of the world.