Portrait / Still life

Saturday, February, 3 – Saturday, March 30, 2024

12:00–19:00

*Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and National Holidays 

[Opening reception: February 3, 5-7pm]

Gallery Koyanagi is pleased to announce the group show "Portrait / Still life" from Saturday, February 3 to Saturday, March 30, 2024. Michaël Borremans, known for his tranquil portraits, has also made some works of still life motifs. In “Commutation” (2008) he depicts several corks. This work seems to be a still life, but Borremans once regarded it as a portrait. Drawing inspiration from this work, this exhibition features works by Daichi Igarashi, Ryoko Kumakura, Kozo Shimizu, and Mioka Matsuura, all exploring the motif itself and delving into the wavering boundary between portrait and still life.

Daichi Igarashi exhibits a still life painting of peaches reproduced in resin. Peaches have long symbolized vitality, fertility, and immortality, as written in Kojiki, the oldest surviving historical record in Japan, and myths across the globe. With resin mixed with iron powder and pigments, Igarashi replicates peaches, which turn deformed and damaged during the process. The hollow inside shows the thinness of the resin which simulates the skin of peaches. He then photographs and realistically paints them. Within his practice, he questions the existence of true nature between the process of reproduction and human perception.

Ryoko Kumakura displays works that explore the imagined shape of Earth in the past, and the obsolete constellation, Cerberus. By composing images from historical documents, she makes the motif herself. She then photographs and paints them. These images have once embodied and solidified the ambiguous nature of past beliefs and imaginations. Through these motifs, Kumakura suggests that the contours of the world remain ambiguous even today and will eventually be overwritten and take on a completely different form, akin to historical precedents.

Kozo Shimizu expresses a contradictory state in his paintings. Composing the clay model made by himself, he turns it into a 2-dimentional painting, juxtaposing several opposing phenomena: fullness and emptiness, expansion and contraction, and light from both the sky and the ground. His work creates something unstable, although figurative, the depicted object or situation cannot be perceived at once. For the exhibition this time, a 17th-century botanical drawing of a tulip with bulb and roots exposed with blooming blossoms became his inspiration, in which he saw life and death simultaneously.

Mioka Matsuura’s artistic narrative incorporates hand-sewn dolls and three-dimensional objects into flat surfaces employing charcoal and oil paints. Matsuura explores the shifts and gaps in quality during the process. Her seemingly distorted and surreal dolls are immobile, but she believes that they seem to come to life through her charcoal drawings which cloth them in a certain beauty. She has made paintings with a single object portraiture, but in this work, she depicts multiple objects, inviting viewers to empathize with the objects and their facial expressions.