Take Ninagawa is pleased to announce the opening of artist Aki Goto’s second solo show at the gallery, “Love You More Than Painting.” The exhibition comprises new small-scale paintings on canvas presented in an immersive installation. Aki Goto is known for making drawings and paintings that evoke the gaps or “lost space” between perception and representation. Sometimes featuring figurative subject matter and at other times geometric abstractions, these works are then arranged in installations that reconfigure the architecture of the display area and the viewing experience. For “Love You More Than Painting,” Goto has created a suite of 18 paintings in oil on canvas. Largely made using a washed-out palette of unconventional colors, these paintings combine flatly rendered geometric shapes and linear, crosshatched details with thickly applied gestural flourishes. The resulting images are suspended between surface and depth, embodying a contradiction of visual regimes. One painting depicts two cone-like shapes - set against mottled color field backgrounds divided by a thick, cream-hued line - that convey only the slightest hint of volume. Another painting features a pastel blue blob and rows of thick red dots rising from a distressed, brackish surface, with black, shade-like smudges around the red dots providing an aborted element of perspective. Still others feature more identifiable content, as in a painting of a black heart and apple-like sphere set against a pale green background marked by curving lines. The paintings will be displayed as part of an immersive installation constructed from painted wood panels partially obscuring the walls of the gallery, with paintings embedded inside the panels. Also included will be a low bench made out of panels supported by cinder blocks, and freestanding, table-like sculptural constructions. With its atmosphere of both warmth and foreignness, the installation will turn the gallery into a space for community and gathering, inviting visitors to enter a habitat as opposed to a viewing room—inviting visitors to “feel” rather than “see” the works, and open themselves up to the coexistence of contradictions. Aki Goto
Born in 1978, Aki Goto graduated from Tama Art University with a degree in textile design in 2002 and is currently based in New York. She is part of a group of artists and collaborators including Yuki Kimura, Yukinori Maeda (Cosmic Wonder) and Teppei Kaneuji who are articulating a new Japanese conceptualism through the use of unconventional yet simple materials, fractured form and environmental design. This is her second solo show with the gallery after “You are the Universe” in 2009. “Love You More Than Painting” is realized in collaboration with New York based artist Kentaro Takashina. * The text provided by Take Ninagawa.