Sunday, October 31, 2010

Kunst Oktoberfest'10

Akio Ohmori, Wolpertinger in the Full Moon, 2007, h 24 x w 24 x d 5 cm, Bronze and stainless steel. Lower Akihabara Gallery.

No in-depth analyses this time around, just a few pictures from the route: 

The weather was dramatically wet—Tokyo was hit by a typhoon on that day.

Dungeon space at Lower Akihabara gallery (East End Route).

Same location.

Cool crowd at the Motus Fort (East End Route).

Exhibition of young Asian artists at Keumsan Gallery Tokyo (East End Route).

Gallery Hashimoto (East End Route).

nca/nichido contemporary art (Nihombashi Route). 

The show there is "Pictures on Paper" by Vik Muniz.

GALERIE SHO Contemporary Art (Nihombashi Route)

ARATANIURANO (Ginza Route)

ARATANIURANO—installation view of Takahiro Iwasaki's "Phenotypic Remodeling" show.

 

 

 

Friday, October 29, 2010

Tokyo Wander Site: "Silent Voice" opening & artist talk

Artist Talk. Left to right: Marwa Arsanios, translator, Kyungwon Moon, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook.

Tokyo Wonder Site opened their latest exhibition "Silent Voice" that showcases the works of four artists: Marwa Arsanios, Nesrine Khodr, Kyungwon Moon and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. With the exception of Moon's oil painting Green House #3 (connected to her HD film Superposition), all the works are either video or video/animation installations. The show will be on through December 12.

CASHI opening for Toshihiko IWATA

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Thursday, October 28, 2010

ULTRA003 at SPIRAL GARDEN: 10.28. trough 11.03.

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Monday, October 25, 2010

Highly Recommended: Kunst Oktoberfest'10

Next Saturday, October 30th, join fellow art & beer lovers on the gallery hopping tour co-sponsored by contemporary art galleries in Tokyo's Central District and "COEDO" brewery. Shuttle buses will be serving three routes with connecting points among them. You can board the buses at any stop, or do the whole tour starting with the East End Route (departing from the East exit at Akihabara station), the Ginza Route (departing from Yaesu Fujiya Hotel), or the Nihonbashi Route (departing from Royal Park Hotel). The buses will leave each gallery every 20–25 minutes from 12 to 7pm.

Twenty three galleries are participating in the event. The buses and the beer tasting at the galleries are free. 

Sunday, October 24, 2010

"Psychological Interiors" at Tokio Out of Place

Mayumi Terada, Door and hanger 1002 / 2010, 25x40x15cm. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Tokio Out of Place gallery's new exhibition, curated by the New York-based curator Mako Wakasa, is a group show of four photographers: Gail Albert Halaban, Lisa Kereszi, Mayumi Terada and Shellburne Thurber.  Although very different in style, all the works reference the concept of interiors, real or metaphorical.

Halaban's city interiors, shot from outside and framed by apartment windows, provide a fishbowl view of New Yorkers' daily lives. Because these are posed, Halaban's specific interiors, just like Terada's symbolic ones function, first of all, metaphorically. They represent settings for interior-appropriate action, prescribed and already known. Halaban populates her settings with human actors while Terada depopulates hers, reducing them to the poetic glow of silver gelatin prints. This existential dichotomy is fully realized in the only non-photographic object in the show—Terada's installation Door and hanger 1002 (2010)—a box with a peephole on one end and a miniature door on the other. As one looks through the peephole, the knowable interior of the box becomes, right before one's eye(s), a versatile interior.

Although Kereszi's photographs of the remnants of the US Coast Guard housing ostensibly deal with interiors as well, the abstracted images of what signifies human dwellings (phones, window frames) function first and foremost as motifs.  

Shellburne Thurber, Andover, MA: Office with chartreuse analyst’s chair, 2000 Chromogenic print 30 x 30 inches (76.2 x 76.2 cm), edition 1/25. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

The fourth artist featured in the show, Shellburne Thurber, is represented with her series of New England's psychoanalysts' offices. Ranging in decor but all similarly perfect and inviting, these über interiors exist to eradicate the problems inevitably generated in  the process of occupying real interiors: the kind reconstructed by Halaban, reduced to their essence by Terada and used as motifs by Kereszi. Curiously, Thurber's interiors, by the virtue of being both real and metaphorical, connect the works of the three other artists in the show just as they highlight the paradoxical nature of its concept.

 

The show is on through November 20.

 

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Andrew Guenther at Motus Fort

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FOIL Gallery: Ed Tsuwaki "CoCo"

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Masumi Nakaoka at Art Front Gallery

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Friday, October 22, 2010

Fur fur 2011 Spring & summer

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Thursday, October 21, 2010

Jazzkatze Spring Summer collection 2011

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Wednesday, October 20, 2010

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.

Monday, October 18, 2010

JFW had started: LIZ LISA

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Saturday, October 16, 2010

Yukiko Suto "Field Exhibition"

Take Ninagawa just opened a new exhibition of large scale panels by Yukiko Sato. 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 rendered 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. Sato's visual recollections—every blade of grass, every flower bud, every little rock rendered in a hyper-realist way—render live nature symbolic. The works, for the most part monochrome, owning to the the dominant graphite of the pencil, are punctuated with matte blotches of color which appears 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, blankness of the panel seeping through and finally taking over. 

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Roadside Garden 2, 2010, detail. Oil,pencil and plaster on camvas mounted on panel, 130.3 x 194 cm.

 The exhibition will run through November 27.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Wako Works of Art Opening

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Monday, October 11, 2010

Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen

Untitled, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 73.6 x 58.4cm. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Last Sunday Misako & Rosen opened a new exhibition of Nathan Hylden's work. This is his sophomore show at the gallery, the last one dating all the way back to 2007. The seven paintings on view (four acrylics and silkscreen on aluminum, and three acrylics on canvas) help to trace the artist's preoccupation with the processes and the effects of pigment application. The regular grid of silkscreen dots enhances the lightness inherent in aluminum, making the works hover above the surface of the wall. In contrast, the paintings on canvas absorb the light, bringing forth the materiality of the texture of the support.

The show will be on through October 31.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Zdravko Toic, The Invisible, at the Hiromart Gallery

“HBeAg,” 2010, paper collage, mat board, ink on paper, 40.6 cm x 101.6 cm. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Just a few paces away from Yuka Contemporary, the Hiromart Gallery is showing abstract paper collages by Croatian-born, New-York based artist Zdravko Toic. The works of view reference surrealist and constructivist vocabularies, reviving the spirit of mid-career Wilfredo Lam and early Naum Gabo. The cut paper portions compete with the inked cores of the work. 

The exhibition will run through November 14.

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Yuka Contemporary Opening

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Friday, October 8, 2010

RongRong & inri map

Untitled No.25, 2008, gelatin silver print, 50.8 x 61 cm, edition of 12. Image courtesy of the gallery.

There is a new addition to the NADiff a/p/a/r/t— the MEM gallery. The gallery has been established in 2003 in Osaka, and has recently relocated to Tokyo. Their inagural exhibition at NADiff showcases the recent work by two Beijing-based photographers RongRong and Inri, a couple that met in 1999 and embarked on a productive personal and professional collaboration. After 2000 the two became something of an art brand, opening, in  2006, the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre which contains a library, a gallery, dark rooms and artist residencies. The fourteen works on view blend personal life with social statements, oscillating between the timeless and the current. 

The show will run through October 22.