Take Ninagawa is pleased to present Yukiko Suto's second solo exhibition at the gallery, "Field Exhibition," with new large-scale works in mixed-media on panel.

Yukiko Suto is known for making striking black-and-white drawings on canvas and paper that explore the intersections between nature and the built environment in Tokyo's residential neighborhoods. Based on photos that the artist takes on extensive walks throughout the city, these obsessively detailed works embody a form of performative documentary practice. Suto's depiction of vernacular architecture and the arrangements of potted plants and shrubbery lining residential backstreets dramatizes the coexistence of two complementary, yet opposed systems of habitude, one that is primarily governed by zoning regulations, economics and necessity and another that is spontaneous, generative and expressive.

"Field Exhibition" features four new works in oil and pencil on canvas mounted on panels. In this body of work, Suto turns her attention from potted plants to the small, private fields that occasionally appear amid urban developments in cities across Japan. Field in Sengawa – Slope (2010), for example, depicts a large plot with orderly rows of vegetables framed in the foreground by various native plants and a low stonewall, while a two-story house and trees are visible in the background.

Suto combines different techniques to give the scene an uncanny atmosphere. The stones of the wall are depicted in realistic detail while a tree in the center of the composition is rendered in outline only, its spindly branches extending outward in grotesque contortions. This collapse of two and three dimensions is reinforced by the slope referenced in the work title: Suto captures a world shifted on its axis. In so doing, she draws the viewer's attention to the drama that constantly unfolds between the incidental, organic and artificial in our everyday environments.

Yukiko Suto
Born in 1978, Yukiko Suto graduated with a BA in graphic design from Tama Art University in 2001. She had a solo exhibition at Tokyo Opera City as part of its Project N series of emerging artists in 2007 and was included in “VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art” at Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, in 2008, and “Tokyo Painting: My Little Everyday Sceneries” at Tokyo Wondersite in 2007. Suto was a recipient of the Yasushi Fujimoto Prize at GEISAI #8 in 2005.

* The text provided by Take Ninagawa.

Opened dates: October 15 - November 27, 2010
Reception: October 15, 2010 at 18:00 start.