Kaoru Hirano and Patrick Neu Exhibition
Gallery KUMUKUMU
This event has ended.
KUMUKUMU presents Kaoru Hirano and Patrick Neu in their first solo exhibitions in the United States. Hirano exhibits a new installation of de-threaded women’s underwear exploring notions of personal history and the intersection of intimacy with public life. Neu exhibits eight drawings in soot on crystal, four watercolors of lilies and three drawings on charred paper that examine transience and impermanence while showing that there’s no need to make easy art when it can be complicated.
Hirano’s new installation sustains her practice of producing works from de-threaded women’s clothing and accessories. Her process shows that dismantlement can be generative, while her intimate and sensual work explores what it means to be an individual. Hirano begins with the notion that nothing remains closer to a person for a longer period of time than her clothing. A garment has a history that refers by necessity to its origin, and by de-threading clothing, Hirano explores the person’s traces and impressions deconstructing what it means to be an individual. The sensuality of the installation recalls the intimacy of the creative process while the conflation of private and public peaks the audience’s curiosity. What is this article’s history?
Neu’s work treats delicacy both materially and metaphorically. On his crystal glasses, Neu miniaturizes Renaissance and pre-Renaissance paintings in soot created by candle smoke, producing impossibly delicate objects by unimaginably difficult means. On place mats charred at 451° Fahrenheit, he draws an angel and a dead Christ, objects perpetually in a state of peril. Finally, every year during spring, Neu gathers irises, significant for their morbid symbolism, curbs their lives them by cutting them from their stalks, and draws them in watercolor on paper documenting their delicacy and their fleeting existence.
Neu’s work leads the audience to confront their own mortality, but more profoundly this work is sublime in its wry rebuttal to the “why” of art. There is no justification for a miniature reproduction of a canonized artwork on the interior of a crystal glass. There is no explanation, symbolism aside, for the appearance in white of a deceased Christ figure on a charred doily. However, in the intricacy of its artistic production, Neu’s work sublimates immediate comprehension. Underlying his work is the quest for a complication in practice that truly advances art.
Media
Schedule
from March 27, 2009 to May 17, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-03-27 from 18:00 to 20:00