Fri. June 7 – Sat. August 10, 2024

Gallery Yamaki Fine Art is pleased to present the exhibition of Kazuyo Kinoshita from June 7 to August 10, 2024. Kazuyo Kinoshita (1939-1994) was an artist who left a strong impression on Japan’s postwar art, mainly through photography and painting. The background of Kinoshita’s work can be traced back to the postwar period of 20 years in the Kansai region, which saw the emergence of numerous groups such as Gutai, Mono-ha, and the Hi Red Center and Neo-Dada in1960s. Kinoshita worked with the avant-garde art collective Group “i” organized in Kobe before and after her first solo exhibition. However, it should be mentioned that she did not necessarily follow in their footsteps when considering the relationship of female artists to the art movement of the time.

Kazuyo Kinoshita was born in Kobe, Hyogo in 1939. From around 1973 to 1980, she employed an electronic reproduction technology called xerography (blueprint photography) to create works that question the nature of human perception. For this body of work, Kinoshita photographed a piece of paper with a figure drawn on it, which was deformed by folding and distorting, and then she further drew a plane figure of the same line or circle on top of the image. What arises from this distinctive dual structure, the overlap of the three-dimensional image and the two-dimensional image, the digital and the analog, is a visual and cognitive misalignment that embodies the certainty or ambiguity of “existence.” This disparity induces those who “see” to ask the profound question, “What is existence?” and makes us muse upon the act of “seeing.” Kinoshita’s work is an examination of “seeing,” and it can be described as an identification of how “I” am involved in the world.

Around 1982, She began working on new paintings while continuing her unique approach to creation after Kinoshita started to feel that the relative understanding of things by juxtaposing one thing against another could not explain the existence of “being” itself, and even the ground of her own existence was becoming less and less clear. The brushstrokes and colors in Kinoshita’s paintings convey the trajectory of her hand movements, revealing her deep interest in sensibilities based on her physicality. In the oil paintings of her later years, she added the process of rubbing and wiping with a cloth after applying paint. The brushstrokes and the traces of the wipes, which emphasize movement, provide the paintings with tension and resonance between the pictorial surface and the exhibition space. Applying and wiping off paint can be seen as proof or declaration of the existence of the movement itself and the painter who executes, while at the same time denying the existence of the painter’s movement and the work. These two movements are necessary and equally valuable actions to create the very existence of the work. Kinoshita successfully represents both, which possess conflicting meanings, as traces that are necessary and equally important for the creation of “existence.”

This year marks the 30th anniversary of her death, and a large-scale retrospective exhibition is being organized at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama. We hope you will enjoy viewing the works of Kazuyo Kinoshita, whose creation has been remarkably re-evaluated in recent years.