| japanese | english |
yoshinobu nakagawa
September 20 - October 25, 2025 |
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Born in Osaka in 1964, Yoshinobu Nakagawa now resides and works in Shiga prefecture. He had many solo exhibitions in galleries in Osaka, Tokyo, Aichi and Hyogo, etc. And Participated in group shows in public museums, art festivals. His works are housed in many museum collections as the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Kyoto Municipal Museum, Ashiya City Museum of Arts and History, Hyogo etc. and in many company collections as Showa Shell Sekiyu K.K., Tokyo. Ever since his first solo show in 1987, the year he graduated from Osaka University of Art, Nakagawa's concern has been consistently the relationship between plants (nature) and human being (farmer), namely agriculture and cultivation, that is a fundamental activity to us. Nakagawa recognizes the relationship between artist and art works as an analogy of that between farmers and plants. The action by Jackson Pollock dripping oil paint onto canvas on the floor, for him, is the same activity as farmers sowing plant seeds on the earth. Nakagawa himself puts pigment or oil paint on canvas as famers sow plant seeds on the field. He works on various materials as farmers cultivate the field to grow crops. His artisanship, which freely controls every kind of materials as cotton cloth, cowhide, beeswax or reclaimed paper and the poetic emotions sprung from the naive form of his works, appearing as if they have been there for a long lime, attract the viewers. This show is titled again "views of seeds, eyes of farmers", a concept that is the starting point and standard for his work for the first time in the past 30 years. Recent works will be on view. Looking back at works over the past 20 years. "Seed on the table" was simply a work of removing images from old canvases and transferring candle soot onto them like sowing seeds. In "germination on the table", I worked as if plowing old furrows (removing away images from the old canvases and the materiality of paint), preparing the soil (nourishing it with new paint and supporting the furrows with plaster bases), sowing seeds (burning the canvas with flame), and letting seeds germinate (fresh plaster emerging through holes in the scorched canvas). Agriculture and Art - though they seem different from each other, they are very close to me. Agri - Culture - Art. Recently, I have been copying Jean-Francois Millet's "The Sower" in oil paint, then burning the surface of the canvas with a torch flame under a perforated iron plate, similar to "germination on the table", creating a flat representation of plaster in a germinated state through the scorched holes. I repeat the process, wishing to erase the meaning of figurative representation of the farmer sowing seeds in oil painting with the carbonized traces of paint and the rises of plaster. I'm often asked why Millet's "The Sower". Among the works of this painter, famous for capturing the idyllic lives of rural folk in his paintings, "The Sower" stands out as distinctly different. Even during the year from 1984 to 1985 when I couldn't find meaning in my work, I kept painting only the head of "The Sower". Additionally, as a leitmotif connecting agriculture and art, I created "Light Pot", "The Sower - right", "The Sower - left" (a three-dimensional piece hung on the wall), and "Sowing Machine" (a three-dimensional piece installed from the ceiling). All of these are homages to Millet's "The Sower". This man in "The Sower" seems utterly different from the figures in Millet's other paintings. He appears to be a man whose body and spirit have split apart, who has forgotten the meaning of sowing and become nothing but a machine. This interpretation is the exact opposite of Van Gogh's praise for "The Sower". I wish to liberate the meaning held within this representational painting, but I wonder how it will appear to the audience . . . Yoshinobu Nakagawa, September 2025 We are looking forward to your visit. |