FOIL Gallery: Ed Tsuwaki “CoCo”
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Masumi Nakaoka at Art Front Gallery
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Jazzkatze Spring Summer 2011
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Hiroko Koshino “Coloré” JFW SS 2011 Collection
The first collection I saw this Japan Fashion Week was Hiroko Koshino’s. The doyenne of Japanese fashion never disappoints, although this season’s show struck some of the same notes as her spring/summer collection from last year. There were well-cut day dresses and evening dresses with overdrawing in india ink, and the finale included a lineup of intricately designed couture gowns. This time the backdrop was a large painting that nicely set off many colorful (cf. the title of the collection) pieces that poured in after the restrained trickle of monochrome ones.
JFW SS 2011 had started: LIZ LISA
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Yukiko Suto “Field Exhibition”
Take Ninagawa just opened a new exhibition of large scale panels by Yukiko Suto. Each of the four images, done in a combination of pencil and oil on gesso-covered panels took months to produce, and Sato’s effort can only be properly appreciated through a close examination of these meticulously executed landscapes. The paintings originate in photographs taken by the artist, but little of the ease and informality we associate with nature remains in the final product, the aestheticized version of the landscapes. Suto’s visual recollections—every hyper-realist blade of grass, every flower bud, every little rock—render live nature symbolic. The works, for the most part monochrome, owning to the the dominant graphite of the pencil, are punctuated with matte bits of color which appear to float upon the surface of the support. It is as if we are witnessing a transformation of an embodied landscape into an imagined one: colors and lines fading away, the serenity of the panel seeping through and finally taking over.
Roadside Garden 2, 2010, detail. Oil, pencil and plaster on canvas mounted on panel, 130.3 x 194 cm.
The exhibition will run through November 27.
