For her first solo show in Tokyo, the artist has shifted her gaze inward with a new body of work titled Lockdown Self-Portraits. Tabouret often focuses on the relationship between two or more figures in her work, but the lack of gatherings in today’s world has shifted her focus to the dynamics between herself and the viewer.
Using Darwin’s original endeavor and On the Origin of Species as a starting point, Laurent Grasso and his studio have been engaged for several years in a process of examining the evolution, mutation, and transformation of the natural world, researching the irremediable transformation of nature by humankind and the inseparable intertwining of the natural and cultural worlds. Based on this enormous survey, the artist has composed a new film for the Musée d’Orsay, while a series of paintings and sculptures have been presented at Perrotin Shanghai.
The exhibition presents thirteen new paintings the artist has created since March 2020 at his Miami studio. A sense of poetic tension prevails in the works, which Bas painted at various scales that range from larger-than-life to intimate, reflecting the broad palette of sentiments experienced by his paintings’ protagonists. A signature in the artist’s unabashedly gilded universe, a suite of young adult men populate borderline surreal mise-en-scènes, with angst left over from teenage years and fragility in the face of their impending manhood.
In the fantastical images Chiho Aoshima has created—whether in her early digitally created work or her most recent experimentation with hand-painted ceramics—buildings turn into fairy-like creatures; trees walk and talk; nymphs wander the graveyard; and even in apocalyptic images, such as of tsunamis, one sees a new world thriving after the end of the world. Her work kindles our imagination for an otherworld that is invisible to us yet is all around us.
With his installation showcasing sculptures as precious sacred talismans, and calligraphic paintings as icons, Othoniel recreates an enclosed forbidden garden of chrysanthemums, a dreamworld he named Yumeji in Japanese. The word bears a dual meaning: “to dream” and “to meet someone you love in your dreams,” as it appears in ancient Japanese poems (waka), published in the historical collections Kokin Wakashu and Gosen Wakashu, in the 900s AD.
