NYAB Event - Tam Ochiai "Tiam O'Shian IV"

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At Team Gallery
Media: Drawing, Sculpture

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Misspellings or the misuse of words are often a starting point for Ochiai’s artwork. For this exhibition, Tam Ochiai becomes Tiam O’shian IV, a prize-winning show cat born in 1899. Ochiai uses a cat in spirit and form to address drawing in paper, sculpture, and text.

For the past two years, Ochiai has created a series of drawings — eternal soup and sudden clarity — that range from the mundane tasks of everyday life to emotional reactions to Beethoven. The style changes to fit the content, from wispy fashionable figures to aggressive abstractions of cat scratches. The installation at Team will include about seventy framed drawings, along with two very large sculptures which can’t help but alter the movement of a viewer attempting to move simply from drawing to drawing. The sculptures serve to foreground the role of the human body and of architecture in the “reading” of drawings.

At first glance, the sculptures appear to be white, masculine, minimal forms, but closer examination reveals the surfaces to be painterly and scratched. Before the opening of the exhibition, Ochiai will bring cats to the gallery to live on his sculptures and, through their movements, draw on his sculptures. Recalling Berthold Lubetkin’s philosophy for the British Modern Penguin Pool, the cat carving sculptures take inspiration from the movement and behavior of cats at play.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Ochiai has created a new book, note on drawing.

Ochiai was born in Yokohama and is based in New York.

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