Yohei Sugita + Natsuko Uno Exhibition

Gallery Strenger

Finished

Artists

Yohei Sugita, Natsuko Uno

Gallery Strenger has been introducing European contemporary art to audiences in Tokyo since its opening in September last year. The Strenger Project is a series of exhibitions focusing on the next generation of young Japanese artists, and the selected artists are given an opportunity to show their work in Europe. This is Gallery Strenger's first attempt at organizing a series of exhibitions that will hopefully act as a bridge between the Japanese and European art scenes. The memorable first exhibition of the series is by Yohei Sugita and Natsuko Uno, recommended by the art "sommelier", Fuyuhiko Yamamoto.

Born in 1983 in Mie prefecture, Yohei Sugita creates oil paintings filled with a sense of tranquility, using press clippings as his motif. These works look like blurred, out-of-focus photographs. Recently he has started to create energetic canvases on which heavy layers of paint have been dynamically applied. Yamamoto explains the drastic change in Sugita's style as "shifting from the static to the kinetic". These energetic paintings are in fact produced through collages made out of so-called "paint skins", pre-dried layers of acrylic paint. Sugita describes this "paint-skin" as the record of his rough experience with atopic dermatitis, an ailment which he developed in his childhood. This collage of "paint-skin" is for him an operation by which he can assemble his experiences and memories from the past.

Natsuko Uno was born in 1987 in Tokyo, and is now a junior at Tama Art University. While still in high school, she started experimenting with a variety of media including oil, egg tempera and etchings to create a space of her own filled with silence, a space from which a melody from an old music box seems to come out from. Uno tries to "capture and depict her daily happenings that have easily slipped away from her memories". For this exhibition, she has selected some ordinary scenes from her everyday life and simply painted them in acrylic on plasterboard. Focusing on the relationship and balance between things in our daily
lives, Uno gives them both a solid reality and a sense of unreality at the same time.

Artist reception: July 11th (Fri) 18:00-20:00

[Image: Yohei Sugita "Blooming at the Sorrow House" (2008)]

Schedule

Jul 11 (Fri) 2008-Aug 9 (Sat) 2008