From 8 June (Sat) to 1 December (Sun) 2024, the exhibition HIRAKU Project Vol. 16: Nozomi Suzuki ‘The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope’ will be held at the Pola Museum of Art.

 

Venue: Pola Museum of Art 1F Atrium Gallery

1285 Kozukayama, Sengokuhara, Hakone, Ashigarashita-gun, Kanagawa, Japan

Dates: 8 Jun (Sat) – 1 Dec (Sun), 2024.

Opening hours: 9:00 – 17:00 (admission by 16:30)

HIRAKU Project Vol. 16 Nozomi Suzuki　The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope

From 7 (Fri) to 23 (Sun) June 2024, Kengo Kito’s installation ‘LINES’ will be exhibited at the Namba Carnival Mall.

 

Venue: Namba Carnival Mall (between Namba Parks and Namba CITY South Building)

Namba Carnival Mall, Namba Parks 1F, 2-10-70 Nambanaka, Naniwa-ku, Osaka 556-0011, Japan

Dates: 7 (Fri) – 23 (Sun) June 2024

Opening hours: 11:00 – 21:00

Press Release

From Saturday 18 May to Sunday 16 June, Agnès B. Gallery Boutique presents Unknown Technics, a solo exhibition by artist yang02.

 

yang02’s work has focused on (post)capitalism, energy issues, degrowth and the political and social impact of advanced technologies. His work has presented a new approach to the future, which is often thought of from a progressivist perspective, but which considers the future from a broader and more diverse perspective.

 

This exhibition, his last in Japan before moving to the US, updates the body of work presented since the Corona Disaster and consolidates it into a single theme: the self-propelled Segway that acted like a viewer in his 2018 work, Contemporary Viewer, is now replaced by an electric wheelchair, tour guide in a non-barrier-free space. The work Device for Graffiti, which strongly reflects yang02’s background in graffiti, uses the words “I HATE FAST FASHION” from Agnès Böhne as its title and is drawn using discarded clothing as a support. The venue will be composed of six groups of works. In this exhibition, yang02 explores a new understanding of technology, and with humour sheds light on alternative values and possibilities that are often overlooked in everyday life.

 

Venue: Agnès B. Gallery Boutique
La Fleur Minami Aoyama 2F, 5-7-25 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo

Dates: 18 May (Sat) – 16 June (Sun), 2024 (closed on Mondays)
Opening hours: 12:00 – 19:00

 

yang02 “Unknown Technics” Exibition

Keita Mori’s solo exhibition “Diagramme des nuages” is held from April 29th to June 29th, 2024 at Center Culturel La Visitation, an art center in Périgueux, France.

In addition to existing framed and video works, we will present an installation that includes locally produced drawings.
Date: 2024.4.29 (Mon) – 6.29 (Sat)
Time: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 13:30-19:00, Wednesday 10:00-19:00, Saturday 10:00-17:30
Venue: Center Culturel La Visitation

Exposition de Keita Mori : « Diagramme des nuages » (in French)

Keita Mori’s artwork is used as a book-binding for a novel by Kazuhiro Ikeya entitled Full Tracking Princesa, to be released by Hakata-based publisher Shoshikan Kanbo.
http://www.kankanbou.com/books/novel/0627

17 Apr 2024 (Wed) – 29 Apr 2024 (Mon – public holiday) Last day closes at 5pm
Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi Main Bldg. 6F Fine Arts Contemporary Gallery

 

The Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present Keiji Usami’s ‘School of Athens’.

 

Keiji Usami, one of the leading painters in Japan’s post-war art history, was born in Suita, Osaka in 1940 and spent his childhood in Wakayama Prefecture.
He aspired to become a painter and set up his studio in Kunitachi City, Tokyo. From the beginning of his career, Usami studied painting on his own, while being closely involved in all fields of art, including art history, music and poetry.

 

A major turning point for Usami came in 1965 when he came across a culture magazine, LIFE, in the USA.
From a news photograph of a riot in the Watts area of Los Angeles that appeared in the magazine, Usami extracted four human figures – “flinching”, “crouching”, “running” and “throwing stones” – and dared to separate them from the political context of the riot, symbolising them and developing them on the canvas. The work is a new kind of abstract painting.

 

There was a strong desire to create new abstract paintings, and an attempt to connect effectively with the world art trends of the time by rejecting the compositions that governed space in the creation of paintings, and developing paintings that were mainly based on the structures extracted by layering human figures.

 

Also, from this period onwards, he consciously produced many large-scale works measuring up to three metres, which were rarely seen in Japan.

 

His works, in which he added the ‘texture’ characteristic of Asian art to the large scale paintings that were the trend in Western art, were highly acclaimed both in Japan and abroad, and he participated in the 36th Venice Biennale in 1972 and served as artistic director of the Steel Pavilion at Expo ’70 in 1970.

 

Usami’s work established a certain reputation, but it was not until 1991, when he moved to Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, where he built a new studio on a hilltop in a good coastal location overlooking the sea, that he began to see a major change in his work.

 

Usami’s work, which until then had been mainly structural, architectural and mathematical in its imagery, was greatly inspired by the majestic nature, adding a mystical element and sublimating it in an extremely organic way, moving towards a philosophical definition of the fundamental issues common to all humanity. The work is a philosophical definition of the fundamental issues common to all mankind.

 

This exhibition focuses on works from the Athenian Academy series, published in 2004, which marked a turning point in Usami’s later years of production.

 

The School of Athens is one of the most famous works by the leading Renaissance artist Raphael Santi, painted between 1509 and 1510 in the Room of Signatures in the Vatican Palace as a wall painting representing philosophy among the murals representing theology, law, philosophy and poetry.

 

Usami chose Raphael’s masterpiece, which brilliantly embodies the classical spirit of the High Renaissance, as the subject matter for his work on the theme of the ‘restoration of time’.

 

It is an attempt to recover the effective spirituality of a static era in the present day, and represents a large circle with a time axis cultivated by the knowledge of mankind, which is also the flow of history.

 

The Athenian School series is the first of Usami’s new attempts to revise Renaissance art in a contemporary interpretation, and is an important step in the development of her masterpiece series, The Deluge, based on Leonardo da Vinci’s A Deluge, which is the culmination of her work. A Deluge” by Leonardo da Vinci.

 

We hope that this exhibition will provide an opportunity for many people to view the work of Keiji Usami, which speaks many words if you lean in close and listen carefully.

 

Digital Catalogue