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Art Fair Tokyo 2018

  • 2018/03/08-2018/03/11
  • Booth S43 | Jonas Wood, Shio Kusaka

Installation view, artwork, left to right: Jonas Wood; Shio Kusaka, Photo: Naohiro Utagawa

  • Installation view, artwork, left to right: Jonas Wood; Shio Kusaka, Photo: Naohiro Utagawa
  • Installation view, artwork, left to right: Jonas Wood; Shio Kusaka, Photo: Naohiro Utagawa
  • Installation view, artwork, left to right: Jonas Wood; Shio Kusaka, Photo: Naohiro Utagawa
  • Installation view, artwork, left to right: Jonas Wood; Shio Kusaka, Photo: Naohiro Utagawa
  • Installation view, artwork: Shio Kusaka, Photo: Naohiro Utagawa
Sakurado Fine Arts is proud to present a selection of works by Jonas Wood, a leading talent in the next generation of American painting, and his partner, ceramic artist Shio Kusaka, in a duo exhibition at Art Fair Tokyo 2018. Portraiture and sports scenes are central themes within Wood`s work, and the exhibition will feature around ten of his paintings, drawings, and prints from the 2000s to the present day. These will be displayed alongside Kusaka`s minimal, pop-inspired porcelain pots. Together, their works create an interplay of two and three dimensional forms, colors, and imagery, reflecting the mutual influence the two artists have on one another`s practice.

【Jonas Wood】

Born 1977 in Boston. Lives and works in Los Angeles. Using familiar scenes and motifs such as interiors, plants, sports, and the figures of friends and family, Wood's process in creating images starts with using fragmented images of two dimensional matter. In this process, he combines graphics from sketches, photographs, or magazine cutouts into a collage, which he then develops into a painting. In doing so, the multiple forms and colors of the various motifs overlap and interrupt one another on the canvas, creating a complex sense of perspective. The repetition and deviation of patterns and details displace and transform the imagery of the everyday into a bold, flattened abstract landscape. The fresh inventiveness of Wood's style is evocative of the radical approach to formalism, as well as the aesthetic sophistication, of modern movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, or Pop art.

【Shio Kusaka】

Born 1972 in Morioka, Japan. Lives and works in Los Angeles. Kusaka's practice as a ceramicist is centered around the object of the pot. Through her grandmother, a connoisseur of Japanese tea ceremony wares, she became interested in Greek, Chinese, and Japanese traditional ceramics. She also found inspiration in the delicate, hand-drawn geometric grids and patterns of minimalist artist Agnes Martin. She designs and hand-draws simple designs on the surface of her works, which beautifully expose their organic imperfections, subtle distortions, and discontinuities. Kusaka gives the pot, with its long history as a functional ceramic ware, new aesthetic possibilities, playfully weaving colors and shapes into its design. In addition to exhibiting her works at the Whitney Biennial in 2014, her work has also been featured in various international exhibitions alongside Jonas Wood, including recently at the Voorlinden Museum of Art in the Netherlands in 2017.

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