TAB Event - Yasuhide Kunimoto Exhibition

Yasuhide Kunimoto Exhibition

This event has ended.
At Base Gallery
Media: Painting, Art Party

Yasuhide Kunimoto has been exclusively depicting groups of people. The reason he has worked mainly with images of young lads in swimsuits is because swimming has long been close to his life. While pursuing painting, Kunimoto began to find the figures or forms of people taking part in sports quite interesting. He did not take an interest in the beauty or healthy-looking appearance that playing sport could possibly provide us with, and yet what attracted him most was the fact that participating in sports occasionally forces us to assume an unnatural and somehow intriguing position. What is uncommon or perhaps even slightly bizarre is the fact that each person in a group is performing the exact same movement at a mere command, when in fact each individual demonstrates a tiny distinction.

Kunimoto sets out to depict such variations not through differences in facial expression, but in the outline of each form. Each sportsperson in the cluster seems to be talk about themselves in secret. Looking at his painting, one cannot help noticing that each figure, even when standing together with others in the group, talks about himself or herself in peace. One seems to hear a still, small voice out of nowhere.

In recent years, Yasuhide Kunimoto has been expanding the range of subjects seen in his works. These do not necessarily have something to do with sports - an intriguing aspect of the human body, for example. Casting our mind back to our childhood, we remember a time when we were trained to line up all together in the schoolyard and treated in a way that would make us not insist on our individuality. Kunimoto's paintings, however, remind us of the small voice of the individual that makes up each existence.

This is his first solo exhibition at Base Gallery.

[Image: "Untitled" (2009) 112 x 194 cm, acrylic on canvas]