International Art News

Uemura Shoen, Mother and Child (1934, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)

From the 7th of September to the 17th of October 2010 – The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
Japanese-style painter Uemura Shoen (1875-1949) preferred motifs such as ordinary people as well as characters in history or yokyoku  (Noh songs).She put strong affections into persons in her paintings, but at the same time maintained stern distance from them to produce graceful, sometimes somewhat rigorous portraits throughout her career. This exhibition presents about 100 masterpieces to explore the essence of Shoen’s art.

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18 July 2010 to 3rd of November 2010  – Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art
Formed in Kyoto in 1996, the visual + performance unit Kyupi Kyupi currently consists of Yoshimasa Ishibashi, Mazuka Kimura, and Koichi Emura. As unit director, Ishibashi undertakes moving image works and directs the unit’s live performances, while Kimura handles spatial design and 3D media art, and Emura, visual design and animation.
Kyupi Kyupi has attained international renown through frequent appearances in exhibitions in Japan and abroad, including “Visions of the Body” (National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto) and the Venice Biennial, not to mention a solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo / Site de creation contemporaine in Paris. By alternately exhibiting moving image installations at art museums and staging performances integrated with moving image works at halls and cafes, they commute freely between art and entertainment, interweaving their involvements in these two territories.
SickeTel -Kyupi Kyupi and Ishibashi will be the first large-scale exhibition at a Japanese museum of the works of Kyupi Kyupi and Yoshimasa Ishibashi, who produces media content as a director of films (“I Wanna Drive You Insane”) and TV programs (“Oh! Mikey”). The exhibition will focus on new creations, including recent moving image works by Ishibashi and
a large-scale installation by Kyupi Kyupi created for the exhibit spaces of this museum.
Various related programs are also scheduled, including film showings, workshops, and a Kyupi Kyupi live performance. As the opening salvo of Kyupi Kyupi’s return to active performing and exhibiting, the exhibition promises to immerse visitors in their dazzling world of moving imagery.

Museum Hours

July 31st to October 17th 2010 – Bridgestone Museum of Art – Ishibashi Foundation
Henry Moore, the pre-eminent British sculptor of the twentieth century, is famous for monumental outdoor sculptures that fuse humanity and nature. Despite his global fame, Moore lived in a small village in the countryside, where he was inspired by the pebbles, bones, and other natural objects he found there.
Moore’s six sculpture was always based on the human form, even when it seemed most abstract. He expressed an organic sense of life in materials that included stone and bronze. The secret of the powerful life force within the organic forms of his sculptures is a humanism that contemporary society tends to make light of.
This exhibition introduces, in addition to six sculptures, forty works on paper, including pastel, watercolors, and lithographs. Preliminary drawings for his sculptures become rare from around 1950 as Moore came to regard his drawings and watercolors as works of art in their own right. The exhibition includes works on paper addressing the Reclining Figure and Mother and Child themes that Moore pursued throughout his life. It also offers the opportunity to see a remarkable series of nineteen Stonehenge prints inspired by that vast and mysterious monument.

Museum Hours

June 6 Sun – July 4 Sun 2010 – Gallery Misako & Rosen
MISAKO & ROSEN is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with Dublin-born (1968), Berlin-based artist Fergus Feehily. Feehily received an MFA from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2002 and subsequently exhibited at venues such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art in both 2004 and 2007, Goethe-Institut, Dublin (2007), Neuer Aachener Kunstverein,Aachen (2008) and Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL), New York (2010). In 2009, Feehily presented a solo exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin and in 2010 took part in the group exhibition Collecting the New at The Irish Museum of Modern Art and (forthcoming) Mixtapes: Popular Music in Contemporary Art at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork. Feehily made his MISAKO & ROSEN debut in the group exhibition “here’s why patterns” (2008).

Modest in scale and material, often incorporating found items and generally pale in palette, the works of Fergus Feehily gently, yet persistently, embody complexity while prompting patience. On first appearance soft, subsequently subversive, Feehily’s work engages viewing. Subtle geographies, both psychic and physical, the paintings and objects in assorted media (sculpture, book) play- reenacting process while activating space. Less perceptual puzzles than possible conversations, Feehily’s works elude closure; many of the recent paintings either contradictorily presenting the hidden (painted surface partially obscured behind another surface) or exposing, counterintuitively, the subtle or as he refers to it, “lower-case” violence used in their making, paintings, for example, screwed to the wall through, rather than behind, their surface.

Gallery Hours

William Eggleston, Paris, C - print, 28 x 35.6 cm, 2006-2008 Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Courtesy Cheim and Read, New York © 2009 Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis

June 5 to August 22, 2010 – Hara Museum of Contemporary Art
The Hara Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of William Eggleston’s work at a Japanese museum. The exhibition focuses on two series of works commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris and shown in their space in Paris for the very first time in 2001 and 2009. The exhibition also shows a group of the artist’s most famous historical works from the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
For three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the father sof color photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary. This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.
On a previous commission, also from Fondation Cartier, and in response to a “go-as-you please” project, Eggleston identified Kyoto as his favorite city, and one he already knew and loved. Always far from stereotypes and attentive to everyday details of urban life, his “democratic eye” once again brings his very personal and strong vision of the world deep into Japanese culture.

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