NYAB Event - "Orange Sky" Exhibition

"Orange Sky" Exhibition

RH Gallery

This event has ended.

This exhibition is named after the orange sky in Fukui's Untitled painting from 2009, because it represents the sense of both spirituality and playfulness intrinsic to the works in the show. Atsushi Fukui, born in 1966, is based in Tokyo. Inspired by renowned comic artists Moebius and Richard Corben, Fukui paints scenes where in the atmospheric landscape is the protagonist. Rendered with a flat graphic light, the images reflect a subconscious exploration of the world expressing meaning in surprising elements of color, movement and form.

Also from the same generation and based in Tokyo, Hideaki Kawashima was born in 1969. Influenced by his studies with Yoshitomo Nara, Kawashima created his own style and population of characters recognizable foremost for their deep, haunting eyes. Recently, however, Kawashima has transformed his figures. The previously amoebic bodies have become more figurative and their features more defined, yet they still appear to be descending from another world. The two years Kawashima spent serving as a Buddhist monk inspired the reverence with which he crafts these beings that are perhaps part human and part Buddha.

Naoki Koide was born in 1968 in the Aichi Prefecture and currently lives in Chiba, Japan. In Orange Sky, Koide presents Pine from 2010, a ceramic sculpture depicting a figure embedded in a pine tree. This work is from a recent series of ceramics depicting people, animals and nature present in the artist's own life. Rather than simply recreating his own surroundings, Koide renders them universally familiar by playfully invoking a childlike innocence in their form and expression.

Katrina Vonnegut was born in 1986 in Vermont and currently lives in Brooklyn. Vonnegut, like Fukui, Koide and Kawashima, playfully strips down the layers of her subjects to create imaginative, other-worldly forms. Inspired by the qualities of space-dyed textiles, chain, concrete and wood 2x4s, her new series of furniture and sculptures emphasizes the raw expression of materials. A room divider, a chair and various abstract sculptures are constructed with metal and knitted dyed rope or yarn. Her transformable coffee table is built with natural wood partly dyed with a translucent black pigment that reveals the grain even as it transforms the wood into an abstract ink painting.