Taka Ishii Gallery Roppongi

Shomei Tomatsu
The Pencil of the Sun, 1971 / 2010
ink-jet print
100 x 70.94 cm

Shomei Tomatsu

Dates: April 16 – May 21 [Golden Week Holidays: May 1-5]

Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film (Roppongi, Tokyo)

 

Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to announce the exhibition of Shomei Tomatsu’s work from 16 April to 21 May. As this is Tomatsu’s debut exhibition with the gallery, we will be presenting a wide range of work; large scale digitally printed photographs previously exhibited in Shomei Tomatsu - The Chiseling of Time at the Nagasaki Prefectural Museum (2010), as well as a selection of several vintage prints.

Photography is a medium brought together through a process of decision-making. First of all, I select the camera, lens, and the light-sensitive material. I select the subject. I select a portion of an endlessly vast space, and crop it. I determine the date and time, and select the light and wind. I select an angle. Then I select an opportunity. I select a few images from the contact sheets, enlarge them and then select one from that selection, and then we arrive at the exhibited piece. A photographer doesn’t offer treatment like a doctor, doesn’t analyze like an academic, and doesn’t support like a priest. Neither do we invite laughter like a comedian, or intoxicate like a singer. A photographer just keeps looking. The whole process concludes in looking and selecting—that is a photographer.

Shomei Tomatsu ‘The Chiseling of Time: 60 Years of Tomatsu Shomei’
The Nishinippon Shinbun, The Nishinippon Shimbun Co.,Ltd., Jul. 5, 2010

The exhibition is comprised of a selection of works from a wide timeframe, ranging from the late 1950s to more recent years. The year, location and subject may vary; however, the tension unique to Tomatsu’s work and his particular sense of composition results in a consistency visible throughout. Tomatsu’s practice bridges prewar photography and the contemporary, whilst exploring the most extreme possibilities of photographic expression.

 

 

Tomorrow Night: Maiko Haruki Solo Exhibition "photographs, whatever they are" 1223

Maiko Haruki, neither portrait nor landscape 2, 2010

 

The exhibition will be held at 1223 GENDAIKAIGA, Tokyo 26 February – 8 May.

Opening Reception: Friday, 25 February 6-8PM.

 

Tomorrow Night: Satomi Shirai Gallery Discussion at Motus Fort

Motus Fort gallery says:

Please join Satomi Shirai for a gallery discussion at Motus Fort on Thursday, February 24, starting at 6:00pm. Hope to see you all there.

２月２４日（木）、１８時よりMotus Fortにてギャラリー・ディスカッションを開きます。皆様のご参加を楽しみにしております。

Let's enjoy discussion and drink.

"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.

 

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. 

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]

 

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.

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.

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.