Yasumitsu Ikoma "The Never Ending Story"

Gallery Terra-S at Kyoto Seika University

Finished

Artists

Yasumitsu Ikoma

This exhibition marks the retirement of Yasumitsu Ikoma, who taught for 37 years in the Western painting course at Kyoto Seika University's Faculty of Art. The exhibition will focus on large paintings (No. 100 to No. 200) in oil, egg tempera, and acrylics. Ikoma has been creating allegorical paintings of people, landscapes, animals, and plants on the main theme of "the cycle of life," and has been exhibiting his works in the art organization Nikikai for 45 years. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions at galleries in Japan and abroad.

Ikoma aspired to become a painter after a Rembrandt exhibition he saw when he was in junior high school. After entering the oil painting course at Musashino Art University, he produced mainly realistic paintings and studied classical Western painting techniques. After completing graduate school, he became aware of the contemporary Spanish painters Antonio Lopez Garcia, Eduardo Naranjo, Jose Hernandez, and others, and traveled to Spain in 1985 to learn more about them. He was fascinated by the cemetery in Granada, which he visited on a trip during Easter, and settled there. One day, while sketching human bones left on a cliff behind the cemetery, he was impressed to discover a pretty flower blooming in the space between the overlapping bones.

This event suggested to me that "a living being dies, decays, and returns to the soil. The soil then nourishes and nurtures new life, and the process repeats itself. The world is made up of a diversity of life, and life itself is made up of elements of the world. This realization of the "cycle of life" was an extremely important event and became a major theme in his subsequent creative activities.

This exhibition provides an opportunity for viewers to experience "The Never Ending Story" that Ikoma has been depicting on large screens over the years, and to imagine the invisible energies that circulate the world.

Schedule

Apr 19 (Fri) 2024-Apr 27 (Sat) 2024