This and the following few posts should have come out weeks ago, after my recent trip to Kyoto in early July, but were set aside because I was on a deadline for the last round of corrections on
my book, and had to handle the usual end of the term papers/exams/grading routines. I am done with both now and will take the next couple of weeks to catch up with my postings.
Soshi Matsunobe, installation view at the Super Window Project gallery. Image courtesy of the gallery.
The Super Window Project in Kyoto has two simultaneous exhibitions at two different venues. The main gallery houses an installation by a young neo-minimalist artist Soshi Matsunobe whose works could serve as illustrations for Donald Judd’s definition of sculpture as “specific objects in literal space.” Matsunobe’s sculptures are made of paper and covered with geometric linear overdrawing in black ink—most of it parallel lines placed at regular intervals. The objects are stacked in various configurations in or around large plywood shelflike display case, with few elongated pieces leaned against the wall and the largest work placed directly on the floor. The arrangement is very precise, in part, because of the optical interaction between the black-on-white linework and the matte black walls of the gallery. Still, Baron Osuna, who curated the show, avoided any semblance of decorativeness, as he allowed the objects to dominate the space and not be subsumed into the larger design scheme.
Takashi Suzuki, “Bau” series (100 photographs), 2009, C-print on wood. 8,5 x 11cm. Edition of 3 + 2 AP.Courtesy Super Window Project, Kyoto. ©2009-2010 Takashi Suzuki.
The second Super Window Project exhibition is at a different location in downtown Kyoto. It showcases the latest work of photographer Takashi Suzuki, a Kyoto-based artist who trained in Boston and Dusseldorf. The photographs are mounted on wood, and, just like Matsunobe’s paper sculptures have a have a distinct “object” feel to them, but one’s perception of the artwork is quite different if the images are seen before the mounted photos. I first encountered these photographs projected on a screen during an artist talk event held at the gallery on July 4, which made me to conceptualize the works in much more formal terms. At the time, Suzuki presented this latest works as an investigation of architecture through photography. The cycle, entitled Bau, shows constructions made of household sponges stacked to imitate architectural shapes. Because the photographs are taken from a 45 degree angle the constructions look almost monumental despite the humble nature of the material that composes them. This re-assignation of meaning reflects Suzuki’s intention to examine how the viewers gather and process visual information, and to understand the mechanisms behind visual cognition. By defamiliarizing the object (sponges), the artist denies their primary function in order to create a new paradigm in which lasting and disposable collide.
Comments Off on Kyoto: Super Window Project
My review of William Eggleston’s Paris-Kyoto show at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art has just been posted on the Artforum Critics’ Picks.
If you would like to see more of Eggleston’s work, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE gallery is now showing him as well. Their exhibition, William Eggleston: 21st Century will be on view through August 4.
Comments Off on William Eggleston ARTFORUM review
The Kodama Gallery in Kyoto just closed their latest show of Kenji Nohara.This is the artist’s third exhibition with Kodama, the previous one was held in Tokyo last November. There were several already familiar works (a plant-like sculpture whose trunk is “planted” in a large pot and whose with molecular-looking leaves have the underside of playing cards, a Mexican souvenir mask lined with fractured mirror fragments, and the groupings of ameba-shaped mirror puddles). A sliver of gallery space was partitioned off for a separate installation of an alley-coffee-house. According to the artist, this installation combines his ruminations on the cultural importance of back alleys, and his memory of a particular coffee house where an old man, visible only from the back, was playing the game of chess—the clicking of the pieces interrupting the silence. The alley-coffee-house is squeezed into a tight space that ends in a sharp-angle lined with mirrors. A heating lamp pointed at a plush cherry red velvet chair keeps the front of the shop realistically warm, while faint tapping stands or the sound of a virtual chess match.
The show also featured half a dozen new large-format paintings, some containing found objects, and an interesting grouping of small multi-media collages. Among these, one collage departs from the basic rectangular format because the thickness of its right margin is almost double of its left. The resulting effect is that of a book left ajar: something presently invisible is about to be revealed.
The theme of pending disclosure repeats in the left section of the collage where a boy scout voyeuristically peeks around an imaginary corner at a vintage pencil drawing of a wide-eyed girl. In my opinion, it is the act of looking that connects these new collages and themirror sculptures: a perfunctory first look, must be followed by a scrutinizing study of the subject, still even then seeing the whole work would possibly require a system of multiple mirrors or some other such magical device for unpacking the artist’s imagination.
Comments Off on Kyoto: Kenji Nohara "Cloudy to Fine Play"
Just a couple of blocks away from Take Ninagawa, Gallery Side 2 is showing the new oil paintings of Yuko Murata. Murata’s subject matter of choice is patently representational—animals, plants and landscapes, but despite their mimetic nature her images seem to go beyond what is immediately shown in them. These remarkably restrained oils have an almost Symbolist (think Puvis de Chavannes) ring to them, they display the silence and the melancholy normally foreign to contemporary art. The animals and plants function first and foremost as motifs that prompt Murata’s oneiric improvisations.
There are two events in conjunction with this exhibition: a book party at BOOK 246 July 9th, and the artist talk at NADiff July 16.
Comments Off on Yuko Murata
Posted
on June 27, 2010, 4:59 AM,
by jfriedman,
under
Uncategorized.
亜 真里男 Mario A.
「新日本画（お茶室）」”Shin Nihon-ga” (Tea-house) 2010年
油彩・キャンヴァス・F40
2010, oil on canvas, 80.3×100 cm
Mario A.’s week-long show is opening at the Bunkamura Gallery this upcoming Wednesday, June 30th. For more information check the gallery website.
Comments Off on Mario A. at BUNKAMURA GALLERY
Chihiro Kabata is showing her latest work (yes, she is very prolific!) at Shinjuku Ophthalmologist Gallery. While every work in the show is done in her trademark purple ink, there are two interesting new developments. First, there is a small work where the markings are linear so that their ball-point origin is not immediately apparent. A colleague of mine pointed out that the parallel lines in this image seem to imitate a brushstroke taken across the surface and back, something like Roy Lichtenstein’s cheeky “brushstroke” in his Big Painting No. 6 (1965). The second departure from Kabata’s floating ink shapes comes in the site specific installation placed in a separate room. It consists of a strip-shaped three part mirror crossed with a jagged ink line that runs across its whole length, turning the corners with the mirror itself.
The exhibition will be up through June 27th.
Comments Off on Chihiro Kabata "事象の地平線 /Event Horizon"
Yuta Hayakawa, installation view at αM
Also in Bakurocho, just a few blocks away from the Motus Fort gallery, the Muashino Art University’s gallery αM, is now hosting the new installment of their six-part series Complex Circuit—an exhibition by Yuta Hayakawa. The works, with one exception all from 2010, are monochrome and are put together compose a palpable, if bizarre, landscape of oversized pebbles, white florescent tubes, a hydraulic sculpture, a spinning bottle attached to a nearly invisible fishline sting, and a bifurcated sculpture made of wooden planks. The latter goes by a soothing title of It’s all right. The cohesion of the works on view makes Hayakawa’s exhibition look more like an installation, a bit too smooth perhaps, but also coherent and very zen.
Comments Off on Yuta Hayakawa at Gallery αM
