part and the whole

June 12th - July 23th, 2010

We are pleased to present new works by Kaoru Usukubu in her second solo show in Germany. 

The young Japanese painter (*1981 Tochigi/JP) has already gained a great amount of publicity in Japan with the dreamlike worlds of her paintings, as recently with the acquisition of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. 

Japanese artists born after 1980 have been familiar with the new visual world produced by video games, personal computers and digital cameras since childhood. Many of their works pose a new question: What is more "realistic" for us, the fictional three-dimensional space created in the artist's imagination or the three-dimensional space in reality? 

Usukubo confronts the question with acute consciousness and strives to answer it with her remarkable technique and impressive colors. The whole and a part, a faraway and a nearby world, are depicted without a clearly fixed positional relationship in Usukubo’s work. 

The part becomes the whole, and the whole appears as a part. She frequently uses photographic images of her constructed surreal situations to capture a moment in the existence of her subject matter but does not attempt to get close to digital images or reconstruct them. 

Kaoru Usukubo studied at Zokei University in Tokyo and at the National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo. In 2007 she received the price of Tokyo University in the Graduation Exhibition of Tokyo University of the Arts.