Tag Archives: National Museum of Art Osaka

My Photograph in Ryan Gander’s Osaka Museum Exhibition

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Laurie says:

Bob Guter

I am especially delighted that my portrait of Bob Guter from Familiar Men is included in the “Ryan Gander -These wings aren’t for flying’’ exhibition opening today at the National Museum of Art, Osaka. I admire the complexity and uniqueness and diversity of Gander’s work and the way disability consciousness is woven and not woven into it.

His work is so diverse that there is no way that only four choices give a sense of his scope

This solo exhibition will present approximately 60 important and new works by Gander, who is now regarded as a standard-bearer of new conceptual art. As the mysterious title suggests, the exhibition promises to escort us to an unknown world.

At the same time, Gander will curate an exhibit made up of works from the museum collection. Using the instinctive human ability to think in terms of comparisons as a premise, Gander will present the works in numerous pairs. Though based on a physical resemblance, the fact that the pieces are derived from different genres and eras will inspire a host of fresh perspectives. And the exhibition, held throughout the entire museum, will allow us to experience the limitless potential of the visual arts. – from the Museum description

He describes this: “It is a self-portrait in the worst possible position”.

His work is formally diverse and has included, “a chess set, a new word, a children’s book, jewellery, customised sportswear, glass orb paperweights and maps,” as well as photography, films, and drawings. Considering Gander’s work, “Appendix”, art critic Mark Beasley said: “It’s an unwieldy yet fascinatingly open account, somewhat like lucid dreaming, which shows the artist at his most arch, open and revealing … an attempt to discuss practice in a form sympathetic to the work in discussion.”
… most of Gander’s art is completely removed from the hand of the artist and carried out by a team of technical specialists. He is often physically incapable of carrying out the making of the work himself. Wikipedia

I’m fascinated and impatient to see what art work my portrait will be paired with. I’ll be writing more about this after the exhibition is up. Meanwhile I’m excited.

Ecce Homo: Pictures at the Exhibition

Laurie says:

I blogged before about a group of my photographs appearing in the National Museum of Art Osaka exhibition “Ecce Homo: Behold the Contemporary Human Image.”

The modern expression of the human form grew increasingly varied in the 19th century with the advent of photography and the rise of painters’ attempts to capture the inner life of their models. In the 20th century, artists imbued images of people with their own sense of introspection, resulting in a variety of new developments. In this exhibition, drawn primarily from the museum collection, we present over 100 works dealing with the human image from the late 20th century by approximately 50 artists, including everyone from Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet to Yasumasa Morimura and the duo of Sun Yuan & Peng Yu.

The exhibition started January 16th (today here, but yesterday in Japan). I’ve been sent a picture of the poster (below). The web site features 9 pictures from the exhibition (including my photograph of Tracy Blackstone and Debbie Notkin in this poster).

Ecce Homo poster
Ecce Homo poster

Yuki Onodera is a Japanese-born photographer who lives and works in Paris. “She acquired the second-hand clothes at Christian Boltanski’s 1993 Paris exhibition “Dispersion”. Boltanski had created a large heap of used clothing, and visitors to the exhibition were allowed to take a bag of clothes home for the fee of ten francs. Onodera did just that, and then mounted each of the pieces of clothing, symbolic of death in Boltanski’s work, thereby symbolically restoring them to individual life and capturing them as bodiless portraits.

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Portrait of Second-Hand Clothing No. 52
Portrait of Second-Hand Clothing No. 52

This sculpture by Marc Quinn is made of polymer and freeze-dried animal blood: “the co-existence of innocence and corruption in the world. Quinn has used not only conventional sculpture material, but also blood, ice and faeces; his work sometimes refers to scientific developments. Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life—spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. (Wickipedia)

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Beauty and the Beast

Ken Kitano‘s image superimposes 38 photographs of Indonesian women, as part of his “Our Face” series. Kitano, who lives in Tokyo has been working on the series since 1999. The project is profoundly influenced by August Sander, who is an influence on my work as well.

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38 Muslim Women Attending the Service at the End of Ramadan, Ambon, Maluku, Indonesia

Kikuji Yamashita served in the Japanese Army in China. “Memories of what he saw and did as a soldier there, including killing a Chinese prisoner, pervaded his ferocious postwar artistic vision and output.” “The Tale of Akebono Village” is a famous surreal oil painting depicting a struggle between Japanese peasants and a greedy landlord.

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The Tale of Akebono Village
The Tale of Akebono Village

I’ll post more about the whole exhibition when I receive the catalogue and have a fuller sense of the show. What I’ve seen so far is really interesting.  I’m looking forward to seeing all of it and reading the curators’ discussions.