A prehistoric sculpture inspires a Tokyo gallery
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Saturday, November 23, 2024


A prehistoric sculpture inspires a Tokyo gallery
“Cure” (2022) by Hiroka Yamashita will be shown by Taka Ishii Gallery, of Tokyo, at Paris+ by Art Basel. Photo:.The artist and Taka Ishii Gallery.

by David Belcher



NEW YORK, NY.- For its debut at Paris+ by Art Basel, the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo decided to go back — way back — in artistic history for some inspiration. As a theme for the fair, the gallery chose the so-called Lion Man sculpture found in a German cave in 1939 and believed to be up to 40,000 years old.

What makes that image so compelling for Taka Ishii, the gallery’s owner, is that it is a hybrid figure: the body of a man and the head of a lion. Other ancient artwork, such as the famous drawings in the Lascaux caves of France, are often just images of the known world. But Lion Man is clearly a human portrayal of a more evolved figure: that of a godlike or made-up figure beyond the everyday creatures that roamed the Earth thousands of millenniums ago.

Ishii used that idea to invite four artists to create new works for Paris+, and he drew on artwork from five other artists for his idea of “Hybrid Figures.” Ishii wanted to honor the true origins of artwork: Lion Man is referred to as the first artistic image, cut from a mammoth bone, created by a human being, although a painting of three wild pigs, believed to be 45,000 years old, was discovered last year in Indonesia.

“I imagined that 40,000 years ago this could be similar to the Buddhist statue because it’s a figure that is almost maybe godlike,” Ishii said. “It’s interesting that in such a prehistoric time that there was creativity. It’s timeless beauty.”

That beauty inspired Ataru Sato, a Japanese painter based in Tokyo, but not in an obvious way. The challenge of creating a hybrid figure spoke to his usual approach of many figures mingling, often quite randomly and intensely. For “Hybrid Figures,” Sato went big. His painting “Maison hantée” took three months to paint, and the dozens of images, many of them quite disturbing and Dalíesque, reflect the state of the world, he said.

“This was inspired by a haunted mansion at a summer fair in Japan during a summer from my childhood,” he explained. “The world scares me because there are so many bad things and sad things going on right now.”

But he wanted to portray that fear and, in a way, release it. Whereas he did not create any actual image that could be seen as a hybrid figure of part man, part animal, the act of painting something so complex seemed to take on a life of its own — almost like a third being.

“I’m trying to understand what can be born as a hybrid of me and the world, which for me is the third entity,” Sato explained. “The painting is the outcome that emerged between me and the world. I’m not trying to overcome my fears so much as understand what they are.”

The 10 artists represented at the gallery’s Paris+ booth range from photographers to painters to sculptors: Tomoo Gokita, Sanya Kantarovsky, Sato and Hiroka Yamashita created new pieces. Ishii chose works by Nobuyoshi Araki and Sean Landers, and arranged works from the estates of Tatsuo Ikeda, Goro Kakei and Kansuke Yamamoto.




Ishii said the collection took on a surreal tone, which seemed appropriate to the hybrid subject matter as well as the moment.

“Surrealism is very popular right now,” he said. “The Venice Biennale is doing a lot of surrealism.”

The works of two particular artists, both deceased, seemed like natural fits for “Hybrid Figures,” Ishii said.

“We show some of the works by the photographer Kansuke Yamamoto,” he said, whose works appeared at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2013. “We include one of his most famous works from that era, ‘A Peculiar Grounding,’ which is a very surreal photo of the skeleton of an animal mixed with a human body. It works perfectly.”

Similarly, the works of the Japanese avant-garde artist Tatsuo Ikeda, who died in 2020, include a fish but with a human face.

“It’s purely coincidental that we have deceased artists in this collection,” Ishii said. “Historical artwork doesn’t look old to me. It can look very fresh.”

For painter Hiroka Yamashita, also making her debut at Paris+ with four oil-on-linen works, the inspiration for “Hybrid Figures” was similar to how she approaches many of her other works.

“Sometimes artists have a concrete plan, but for this art fair I improvised after Taka sent me the statement about his hybrid concept,” Yamashita said. “I started with my brush and some different colored paints, and they began to dissolve and started to look like a face and body parts.”

The hybrid idea helped each painting take on its own identity, she said. What evolved was not unlike some of her previous landscape works, where it is not always about the viewer’s looking out at the landscape so much as the landscape’s looking back, she explained. That took on new meaning when thinking about a 40,000-year-old piece of artwork that may well express an early human’s desire for a shamanlike figure in a world of awe-inspiring and terrifying landscapes.

“What I do in my work is gaze from the natural world or from a landscape back at humans and how we exist in a multidimensional world,” she said. “I try to visualize how humans act but really try to show the human desire for a spiritual connection.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.










Today's News

October 22, 2022

Paris+ Art Fair opens: More corporate, less French

More art to see in Paris this fall

Billy Al Bengston, painter who channeled California Cool, dies at 88

A prehistoric sculpture inspires a Tokyo gallery

Two stunning special exhibitions kick off 'The Year of Pre-Raphaelites'

Alex Katz: Six ramps of a painter's progress

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco acquire rare work by Canaletto

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston opens first major American survey of Frank Bowling's work in over four decades

The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg to open its first exhibition focused solely on Black artists and artisans

Norman Lewis, Winfred Rembert & more shine in Swann Galleries' Fall 2022 African American Art Sale

Getty Research Institute acquires Evangeline J. Montgomery archive

5 artists to watch at the California Biennial

Top 20th century artists featured in the Estate of Melvin S. Rosenthal

Cy Twombly in Los Angeles: Cheeky, challenging, classical

An artist embodies an approach to music without borders

Review: In 'Topdog/Underdog,' staying alive Is the ultimate hustle

A shrinking town at the center of France's culture wars

wani toaishara wins the 2022 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award

"The Chapel" funeral tomb designed by BERGER+PARKKINEN

From Body to Horizon: An exhibition of paintings by queer artists opens at LGDR

Gordon Parks' Segregation Story Expanded Edition released earlier this month

Simon Foxall: Self Portrait as a Thumb in a Storm now on show at the Alchemy Gallery

Solo exhibition A L E P H at the Fred & Ferry Gallery recently opened in Antwerp

Mettere al Mondo il Mondo, curated by Mark Godfrey, on view at the Thomas Dane Galery




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful