Exhibition/event has ended.
[Image: Masahiko Kuwahara "Untitled" acrylic on canvas 53.0 x 53.0 cm]

Masahiko Kuwahara “fantasy land”

Tomio Koyama Gallery Roppongi
Finished

Artists

Masahiko Kuwahara
Born in Tokyo in 1959, Masahiko Kuwahara started exhibiting his work in the 1980s. He has consistently expressed a sense of absurdity with regard to scenery and humanity being changed by modernization. Kuwahara himself grew up surrounded by inorganic buildings and scenery created by Japan’s economic prosperity during the 1960s and 70s, dolls and toys that were consumed and abandoned to anonymity, and uncanny creatures living by polluted water. He depicts their sadness in light and humorous ways, assimilated with pale color tones and blurred outlines, suggesting our contemporary sense of fleeting emptiness, dullness, and loneliness, yet also enabling us to feel a mysterious kind of happiness.

This exhibition, “fantasy land”, is Kuwahara’s 10th solo exhibition since “Abandoned Child” in 1997 at Tomio Koyama Gallery, and will feature new and older works encompassing approximately 30 paintings. Kuwahara depicts in witty ways the oddness of the world that we usually overlook. Viewers are invited to see how he expresses desires in contemporary society in 2017.

Art critic Midori Matsui has analyzed the similarity of Kuwahara’s work with the “Bad Painting” that became popular in the United States in 1997-98: ‘…(Painters of Bad Paintings) thus succeeded in widening the range of contemporary painting by asserting “regional imagination” against the institution of modern painting, while releasing the historical as well as personal “shame” born of repression by strategically adopting the cheapest, most “anonymous” style of popular painting today. Although in a less flagrant way, Kuwahara’s own painting joins with their “aesthetics of the margin”.’

In the article “Strange=Painting,” which appeared in Studio Voice in August 1999, Matsui goes on to explain, ‘It was in 1995 at the Tokyo Pop exhibition that I first saw Kuwahara’s painting…his “negative pop” style conveyed the shame and sadness of marginal expression exiled from the glittery domain of “major” industrial commodities and Contemporary art, imprinting of “shame” or a minor “evil”. Kuwahara’s work possesses an uncannily biomorphic feel, suggesting the interior of a body and brain set apart from the “landscape”… This may well be a representation of the physical perception of the subconscious that lies behind the rationally demarcated and explicitly explained “reality.”’

Schedule

Jun 23 (Fri) 2017-Jul 22 (Sat) 2017 

Opening Hours Information

Hours
11:00-19:00
Closed
Monday, Sunday, Holidays

Opening Reception Jun 23 (Fri) 2017 18:00 - 20:00

FeeFree
Websitehttp://tomiokoyamagallery.com/en/exhibitions/kuwahara_fantasy-land_2017/
VenueTomio Koyama Gallery Roppongi
http://www.tomiokoyamagallery.com/
Location2F Complex665, 6-5-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0032
Access2 minute walk from exit 1b at Roppongi Station on the Hbiya or Toei Oedo line, 8 minute walk from exit 7 at Azabu-juban Station on the Nanboku or Toei Oedo line, 11 minute walk from exit 5 at Nogizaka Station on the Chiyoda line.
Phone03-6434-7225
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