PARCEL is pleased to announce the opening of a group exhibition by six Japanese artists, representing their generations, starting on October 16. This will be an opportunity to show new works in a wide range of styles, from abstract to figurative, as well as one of the largest works by each of the artists.
In 2015, Auto Moai began creating works in monochrome, has been using a lot of color since 2018, and is known for a distinct style in which a highly anonymous “presence” seems to be standing on the canvas. The artist’s style, which is extremely objective but also appears to be a very personal scene, presents us with views and sceneries that can be found through the removal of elements, such as the relationship between people and the relationship between the painting and the viewer.
Born in 1980, Taku Obata is a sculptor known for his series of B-BOY-inspired sculptures based on his roots as a break dancer. More recently, Obata has been exhibiting works on canvas using mainly acrylic paint, reflecting the relationship between modeling and carving in the context of sculpture. By relocating the “scraped” mass from a canvas covered with paint to a different blank canvas and “molding” it, Obata takes a new approach to paintings from a sculptors point of view. The artists has been working on the theme of the movement of the body and mass from his early career, portraying this through various media.
Hiroya Kurata, also born in 1980, currently lives and works in New York. Kurata has created a series of works in the past that were inspired by baseball, both as a pure enjoyment and as a symbol to convey the many messages behind the game. In recent years, the artist has moved away from baseball, and started a series of works focusing on family members. As the COVID pandemic has prevented him from traveling and staying outdoors, his family was what he was closest to, and interacted with every day. Although the works are based on moments that the artist himself actually experienced, they are also vividly depicting the trivial happiness that we, the viewers, feel in our daily lives.
Born in 1993 and currently based in Tokyo, BIEN outlines the shapes of man-made letters, symbols, manga and anime characters with dynamic lines, inheriting and sublimating the various modes of expression of street culture and animation culture, while attempting to deconstruct and reconstruct symbolic meanings. At his solo exhibition at PARCEL in March 2021, he unveiled a series of works in which black lines run inexhaustibly over a combination of panels composed of colored surfaces of light (landscape) captured by a camera, taking on the challenge of a new expression of abstraction on the boundary between fiction and reality.
Koji Yamaguchi is an artist based in Tokyo, Japan since 2018 after working several years in New York. He is known for his oil paintings, which are mainly inspired by the scenery Yamaguchi himself rode passed, while riding his skateboard. The overall blurred look of the screen conveys the sense of speed that Yamaguchi must have experienced. The ambiguously maintained focus of the paintings, which can be referred to as a record of the artist’s behavior, overlaps with common landscapes that give us a sense of déjà vu, making them appear somewhat nostalgic to our eyes.
Kentaro Minoura was born in 1978 and currently lives and works in Tokyo. The accumulation of his own experiences and experiences are mimicked as his mental landscape, and appear on the canvas as a kind of “creature”. The works can be described as a self portrait that reflects Minoura’s own upbringing, where he was introduced to a wide range of cultures, including anime, games, movies, music, and street, without being particularly conscious of the boundaries between them. Minoura uses a wide range of painting materials, from classic oils to spray paint, and the unique combination of these mediums enables him to add depth to his paintings. In recent years, he has been actively producing not only works on canvas but also three-dimensional works on ceramic, expanding the range of his expression.
The exhibition will feature ambitious works on a large scale by six artists who have been actively expanding their activities as an artist. We look forward to seeing you at this exhibition.
