Yoshiaki Mochizuki “Summer Solstice”

Marlborough Chelsea

[Image: Yoshiaki Mochizuki "Untitled 5/15" (2016) gesso on board, clay, moongold leaf, 20 x 20 in.]

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2nd Floor

For his third solo exhibition with the gallery, New York artist Yoshiaki Mochizuki has created a dozen new paintings on wood panels featuring his signature use of layered gesso, burnishing clay, ink, pigments and precious metal leafing. These materials are each subjected to various treatments including sanding, polishing and manual distressing. Finally, the surfaces are scored with a needle resulting in highly detailed, tightly wrought patterning, and a dynamic excavation of these underlying layers.

In contrast to his earlier work (and as a result of a recent trip through national parks of the American Southwest including Zion and Monument Valley) these scored lines have taken on more curves and irregularities, evoking geological strata and erosion where the grid had prevailed in the past. This bent towards a more biomorphic, undulating line helps to underscore a consistent humanizing thread throughout the artist’s practice, and a particular relationship to the body. As usual, the relatively small paintings are all hung at the artist’s height of 5 feet 9 inches indicating that they function as an analogue for the artist’s head or face. As we move around the room in relation to them, their surfaces are in a constant dynamic flux that suggests movement, respiration, and expression. Importantly, as a viewer is reflected in their surface, the works also change dramatically as a result, instigating an ongoing choreography for the paintings, their audience and surroundings.

Intentionally installed to coincide with the longest days of the year, Summer Solstice acknowledges that light conditions are also extremely important in the activation of these surfaces. The angle of an artificial light source, the relative temperature of the bulb, and the ever-changing qualities of direct and ambient sunlight all play a role in their appearance at any given moment. Throughout the exhibition, Mochizuki will be experimenting with lighting and emphasizing the use of natural light, through the terrace windows, whenever possible. Repeat visits to the exhibition will reveal that Mochizuki’s paintings are interactive objects, mutable and never static.

Yoshiaki Mochizuki was born in 1961 in Tokyo, Japan and received his BA from The Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan (1987). In 2005, he attended the Fashion Institute of Technology where he received his BFA, and later receiving his MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2015), Grey Noise, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, NY (2014), and Stars and Stripes: American Art of the 21st Century from the Goldberg Collection, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery,
Bathurst, Australia (2014). The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY.