Yoshino Masui “I Answered It Was a Cat”

8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery, Shibuya Hikarie 8F
March 30 – April 25, 2016
Venue hours : 11am – 8pm
Open everyday during exhibitions
Free Admission

Opening reception: Wednesday, March 30, 6pm – 8pm
*Artist talk: Wednesday, March 30, 7pm –

http://www.hikarie8.com/artgallery/2016/03/yoshinomasui.shtml

Masui’s works are delicate and finely detailed watercolor paintings. After first applying a watercolor undercoating to the paper, she then builds up paint in layers on the picture plane, and creates the unique textures of her works through a combination of the effects of seeping blurs of the paint soaking into the paper, and her scrupulously careful application of line. Memories of the colors and the smells of her childhood, together with the cats, horses and birds that were in intimate proximity to her, co-exist organically on the backgrounds of Matsui’s paintings, as though these animals depicted therein are the symbolic creatures of myth.
The Mori Art Museum Chief Curator Mami Kataoka has written, ‘With watercolor on paper, she creates abstract landscapes that reference mythological narrative alongside traditions of pattern and decoration. Most of her compositions include a single animal moving through imaginary environments.’ (Mami Kataoka, ‘MASUI, YOSHINO’, The Younger Than Jesus Artist Directory, Phaidon/New Museum, 2009.)
Her works, woven from the experiences and mythologies she encountered in her hometown, affect viewers a sense of nostalgia or homesickness. We warmly invite you to view this exhibition featuring the works from her most recent solo show at Sumpu Museum in Shizuoka, accompanied with new works.

Yoshino Masui was born in 1976 in Yaizu, Shizuoka. She studied Oriental Fine Art at Tama Art University and is now based in Tokyo. As well as creating the cover design for the Akutagawa Prize-winning author Kenichiro Isozaki’s début work The Crucial Child (winner of the 44th Bungei Award in 2007, sponsored by Kawade Shobo Shinsha), she was also proposed by Mami Kataoka to be published in the book The Younger Than Jesus Artist Directory, in which curators and critics throughout the world nominate their recommended artists born after 1975. Masui has held four solo shows with Tomio Koyama Gallery in 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2013 respectively, and in January 2016 she held a solo exhibition at the Sumpu Museum.

More information about Yoshino Masui :
http://koyamaartprojects.com/en/artists/yoshino-masui/