Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “Katsura Funakoshi”.
Tuesday, 11 October － Saturday, 5 November, 2022
gallery hour : 11:00 – 19:00 , closed on Sunday and public holiday
Venue: Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery 2F, 3F
special cooperation：Gallery Nishimura, Tokyo
It has been almost 18 years since I began creating “Lines of Flight,” an oil painting done with one stroke with a brush two meters across. I tried many times in the past to create works in color, but I have never been able to produce anything satisfactory. But I decided to hold my first solo exhibition featuring color works, as I believe that for the first time I have something to show to you.
The concept of weaving between dichotomies is a theme that runs through the foundation of my work. I created my color works around two axes: “colored and achromatic,” and “false and real images”. The latter was inspired by landscape reflected on the surface of water.
With the pandemic beginning in 2020, and tensions in Ukraine cropping up in 2022, the world of today is one full of turbulence. But there is still beauty from the coming together of things, of things unfragmented. I hope you are able to enjoy the exhibit.
June, 2022 Akihito Takuma
ダニエル・ヌニェスは、1988年にスペインのマドリードに生まれ、Higher School of Professional Drawing (ESDIP)を卒業し、現在もマドリードにスタジオを構えるアーティスト。ヌニェスは、自身を取り巻く様々なシンボルを彼自身の世界観に置き換え、独自のタッチで表現します。靴、植物、電話など私たちの身の回りに存在する何気ない日常のアイテムは、ヌニェスのキャンバスを通して無視できないものへと生まれ変わり、魔法のように物理的な存在感を獲得します。
We, Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery are pleased to present the group exhibition “PLAY” by three young artists, Yui Uchida, Minami Haraguchi, and Daniel Nuñez.
Yui Uchida is an artist born in Yamanashi and currently based in Tokyo. She creates works by applying celluloid techniques; anime-cels, used in the animation production process. While new technologies are being created every day in today’s society and the use of anime-cels are shifting to digital technology, Uchida applies and utilizes this traditional celluloid technique to give movement to her paintings. The images depicted on the transparent sheets evoke a sense of nostalgia, walk among our memories, and create their own stories. Uchida links the fragility of these vanishing celluloid techniques with the images themselves drawn on these vulnerable transparent sheets.
Minami Haraguchi is an artist born and based in Osaka and completed her MFA at Kyoto City University of Arts in 2016. Haraguchi paints ordinary objects and landscapes that exist around her; repeatedly crossing between various materials and mediums such as drawing, collage, clay, acrylic, and oil. Some parts protrude, while some parts are lost and the images used as inspiration lose their original forms as our personal memories transform over time. The canvas reminds not only of what the artist has seen, felt, and experienced, but also evokes our own memories.
Daniel Nuñez was born in Madrid, Spain in 1988, graduated from Higher School of Professional Drawing (ESDIP), and is still based in Madrid where the artist has a studio. Nuñez translates the various symbols that surround him into his own worldview and expresses them with his unique painting technique. Common everyday items that exist around us, such as shoes, plants, and telephones are transformed in Nunez’s canvas into something non-negligible, magically acquiring a physical presence.
With the theme of sincerity in playfulness, this exhibition, “PLAY” unravels the raw sensitivity of emerging talents and their strength as well as their potential to create a new future.
It has been over a decade since I started working at the part of stone factory in Sekigahara as a studio. In these few years I spend most of the time at this studio while I’m in Japan. On the way to the studio by motorbike, I often notice a stone lantern standing by the roadside. My growing up in Tokyo, it is a bit uncommon and a strange sight. Is it related to the numbers of stone factories in this area, I wonder!?
At some point in these days, I began to care about one lantern when travelling to a neighboring town. In a word, that lantern looks like a human. When that lantern happens to be at the corner of my sight, I turn around under the illusion that I come across someone. That is like human standing by the size and proportion, and I even feel a sense of its gaze through the lantern. That lantern doesn’t look so old, and I don’t want to say, “the soul dwells in the stone” or such a ghost story. It just happens to me.
The main new work in this exhibition is based from such a daily frame. Looking at the lantern like a human being, I wanted to make a sculpture combined a human and a lantern. And as I work on it, I gradually think it becomes an important meaningful motif to me. The function of “Tōrō(Japanese stone-lantern)” which leads the soul of the dead returning home by its light also seems to illuminates my road of “sculpture” I walk. Art and creation might be connected to a place, the next world. “Tōrō” doesn’t mean that it is a leading role, so to speak, but only a supporting role. For me, who spent my childhood avoiding “standing out” as much as possible, I feel the same sense of familiarity with the way the “ Tōrō” has. This time I wanted to curve the one which could play a leading role at this exhibition.
With Lantern Man centered in this exhibition, new pieces of sculptures are arranged around like installation. And among its components, numbers of “4” and “13” which are said to be ominous in Japan and Western countries are hidden. And in addition to the Western sculpture techniques I usually incorporate in, there are also parts that I refer to Asian modeling, such as Buddhist art and stone gardens. The combination of these ideas comes from my daily life. At the same time, however, under this corona pandemic Asians and Asian Americans sadly have been thrown to strict dangers in New York City, my other stronghold, all which have effect on process of my sculptures. I have a strong feeling to think over Asian and Western cultures. Now again I reconsider my identity and would like to express my role as an artist.
I’m highly grateful for visitors to the venue even in this severe condition. I hope this exhibition will lighten viewers up for the better, even slightly…
November 14 Sat － December 12 Sat, 2020（12/15 Tueまで延長致します）
谷口真人は、1982年東京都生まれ、東京藝術大学大学院美術研 究科先端芸術表現専攻を修了し、これまで「美少女の美術史」 (青森県立美術館 / 静岡県立美術館 / 島根県立石見美術館(巡回 展)、2014, 日本)、「TOKYO POP UNDERGROUND」(Jeffery Deitch、2019, New York, Los Angeles)などの重要な展覧会に参加しています。 谷口の作品に特徴的にあらわれる”距離”の感覚は、映像、画像、バーチャルリアリティ、パーソナルコンピュータのユーザインターフェイス等の現代的情報環境からの影響を感じさせると共に、人間の認識への問いや感情移入作用を通じて、作者の内的、主観的なイメージを、観る者の内へ呼び覚まします。
それはわたし、あなた、それ、が、重なりあうほど近く、手の届かないほど遠くに感じられる感覚です。本展では等身大を含めた新作の鏡を用いたペインティングを２階で、昨年ニューヨークで発表した映像を用いたインスタレーション作品を再構築し３階で発表いたします。
April. 1 Sat － April. 24 Mon, 2023
北川宏人(1967年－)はモデリングの状態から乾燥過程で内部の粘土を掻き出すことで空洞をつくり、原型をそのまま焼成するという特殊な手法で「時代を切り取る」彫刻作品を作り続けてきました。やわらかい粘土で細身の立像を作り上げるという困難な手法で等身大の制作を続けてきた北川が、コロナ禍の与えられた時間の中でこれまでの経緯を振り返り、土や釉薬についての課題に取り組みながら、新たな挑戦として初めて等身大を超える２メートル級の制作に取り組みました。作品は世の中を宇宙空間というスケールに置き換えそれを守る戦士のイメージです。
陶芸の技術や土という素材を出発点としながらも新しい表現を模索し続ける４名の作家たちをご紹介します。
