Cool Hunting
Discovered by Takashi Murakami when he staged the first GESAI art fair in 2002, Rei Sato has become part of the Kaikai Kiki roster of emerging Japanese talents that includes Chinatsu Ban, Aya Takano, and Chiho Aoshima, each of whom was included in the 2005 exhibit "Little Boy," Murakami's sweeping survey of contemporary Japanese pop art. Only born in 1984, the young Sato is now staging her first solo show in the States at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York.
Like her elder peers, Sato's work dovetails nicely with the Murakami art factory brand of bubblegum art. Exploring notions of kawaii (the Japanese pop cultural affinity for cuteness) and alienation, Sato paints smiling children over innocuous photos of everyday existence (click image for detail). Separated, these techniques could result in saccharine paintings and mundane photographs, but combined, the works succeed in conveying an ethereal, albeit cute, subtext to quite normal surroundings.
Through 8 August 2008
Lehmann Maupin Gallery
540 West 26th Street
New York, NY 10001
map
tel. +1 212 255 2923
More images and caption info after the jump.
Click images for detail.
Captions from top to bottom:
Who will you grow up to be?, 2008
Photo print, acrylic, water-based paint on canvas with aluminium frame
1200 x 1800 mm
Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
©2008 Rei Sato/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Copycat, 2008
Photo print, acrylic, water-based paint on canvas with aluminium frame
1200 x 1800 mm
Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
©2008 Rei Sato/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Let's all go to a party, 2008
Acrylic and pen on photo and wooden frame
127 x 180 mm
Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
©2008 Rei Sato/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
A certain... (When I lick the bird), 2008
Photo print, acrylic, water-based paint on canvas with aluminium frame
530 x 800 mm
Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York
©2008 Rei Sato/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
|
previous entry Bubble Calendars |
next entry Weekend Warrior |
Currently on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York, Japanese artist and Kaikai Kiki collaborator Mr. is presenting his first foray into film with "Nobody Dies," a 35-minute short about a group of adolescent Japanese girls who partake in a paintball riddled war game of capture-the-flag. Carefully toeing the line between perversion and commentary, the film is a continuation of the artist's investigation into...
Appropriated images become pop kaleidoscopic spectacles in Ramon Vega's work. By isolating figures from the barrage of pop culture, the RISD grad creates snowflake-like patterns—the repeated symmetry has the meditative feel of religious mandalas—referencing sports and fashion. The results, like "Inside Upside" (pictured, click for detail) retain their slickly commercial feel and are also surreal configurations of the body, not unlike the work of Jean-Paul...
Featuring work by artists who are "altering materials and repurposing objects that prompt viewers to investigate the act of looking and perceiving," the unifying theme behind the impending group exhibition "Deviate" may be a little broad but it makes for a show that speaks to CH's penchant for the obsessively subversive. The nine artists represented take a largely conceptual approach using a diverse collection...
Since our first mention of Kenichi Yokono in 2006, the Japanese artist has been working at a furious pace and garnering attention from gallerists and collectors alike. For the past three years, Mark Moore Gallery has been showing Yokono's work during the Pulse Contemporary Art Fairs, while in 2007 the gallery gave the artist his first solo show stateside. The forthcoming show at Mark...
by Laura Neilson and Tamara WarrenAutos, art and transit collide when Robin Rhode's painting made using BMWs as paintbrushes and four of BMW's iconic "Art Cars" are put on show at Grand Central Terminal starting tomorrow. The project dates back to 1975 when French race car driver and art collector Hervé Poulain dreamed it up and commissioned his friend Alexander Calder to reconceive his race...
by Tamara Warren If the best work comes from life experience, then Michel Auder married well. Or at least he married intriguing people—Viva, a Warhol superstar and photographer Cindy Sherman—who added color to his already vibrant life story. The Paris-born artist and filmmaker has done just about everything interesting in the past forty years. To prove it, he kept a diary of his days...
J. Howells Werthman: We Are Making Plans
PhoneSuit MiLi Pro Video Projector
iPhone HP Calculators
Society6
Bedol Eco-Friendly Water Drop Clock
Context x Kicking Mule 1980 Hand Dye Jeans
Liquid Image Camera Goggles
Interview with Erik Madigan Heck of Nomenus Quarterly
Photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten
