YAMAMOTO GENDAI

Group exhibition “Unfamiliar Landscape”

This group exhibition presents a collection of “unfamiliar landscape” created by four of our artists: Tiger Tateishi, keisuke Tanaka, Natsumi Hirakawa, and Shoko Matsumiya. These works are themed around curious sceneries and people that tend to be overlooked in daily life, and a peculiar world of imagination.

Tiger Tateishi was one of the masters worked actively in the art scene since the 60’s. The now deceased artist has left numbers of unfading paintings and three-dimensional works. They have made tremendous influence on all sorts of creators and are keeping gaining new fans even nowadays. In this exhibition, we are proud to present six small paintings to be shown for the first time. These soft, green toned pictures depicting mysterious landscapes depart from his commonly known gorgeously colored large paintings.

Keisuke Tanaka is a young wood sculptor who had held a solo exhibition here at YAMAMOTO GENDAI last year. His work varies from large pieces that seem like the supporting pillar of a building, to reliefs and traditional wood engravings colored with acrylic paints. The components of his sculpture look like cutout from nature at first glance. But a closer look discovers that they are things of human labor such as afforested mountain, grave, ferris wheel, and torii. These motifs decorate Tanaka’s sculpture with a tint of humor. He will present various new sculptures done with acrylic on wood.

Shoko Matsumiya is an artist working with glass. Her work had been introduced in the group show “Dream of the Skull” held at YAMAMOTO GENDAI when the gallery moved to its current location, Shirokane. Matsumiya mainly produces installations consist of extremely delicate sharp glass pieces. It seems that if touched, both will get hurt from the friction. Despite the nature of the material, however, the work appears organic. In this exhibition, her new installation seems like whether a beautiful mold or myxomycete, or a creature from the ocean. It extends both from the ground and ceiling, reaching each other in the middle.

Painted extemporaneously with aggressive brush strokes, Natsumi Hirakawa will present new paintings of peculiar sceneries and people of Japan. She dropped out of art college as she had “seen the end of it”, and has been making painting at home since then. The artist’s critical view towards reality seems to secretly change the familiar matters around us to something particular.