calendario eventi  :: 

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19/1/2005

Two exhibitions

White Cube, London

Mika Kato

White Cube is pleased to present a new exhibition of paintings by Japanese artist Mika Kato . Kato (born 1975) makes intensely rendered oil paintings of young girl's faces, close-cropped and hallucinatory in quality, they create a portal into a fantastical and psychologically disturbing world.

Kato's technique is interesting since she starts not by sketching but by sculpting a doll out of clay, dressing it and then making a painting from that which is laborious and studied, a kind of evolving alter ego. “I wanted something that people had never seen before” she explains, “and that is how I came to be attracted to using doll faces as my starting point”.

Kato's portraits are precisely and beautifully painted, almost hyper-real, but this imminent reality is countered by their composition, a looming and close cropped image that makes the girls appear distorted, as if viewed through a bulbous fish eye lens. Huge, gaping eyes become liquid pools of black that appear like holes in the canvas, deflecting as much as absorbing the viewer's gaze. These figures have an overly articulated beauty made up of its idealised components: large eyes, perfectly oval faces, small noses and mouths. Their physique is almost ironic, a kind of mutated idea of what perfect beauty should be, an aberration comprised of perfectly formed parts.

Kato gives very little extraneous detail in her paintings – which present simply a face with the top of the head, and the start of the shoulders only just visible. This lends the work a disembodied quality, which is enhanced by the shaped canvases, the corners of which Kato has rounded-off like an old TV screen. Iconic and perverse they are also highly alluring, their gaze inescapably direct and confrontational. In one work, entitled Canaria (1999), the girl's eyes, bordered by perfectly curled lashes, are misty and punctuated by a circle of light, as if she is gazing at something in the distance and about to cry. In another ( Sunrise , 1999), huge brown eyes are marked by a stain of red: a small broken vein on the surface of the eyeball. Occasionally, additional elements such as an animal skull, acting like a memento mori , or scarves and hats are added to create a glimpse of a fictional character that is both partial and alluring. In Constellation (2004), the girl has been dressed in an opulent headdress set with a crystal at either side, and holding a flower placed in front of her mouth that seems made of cloth, soft and slightly out of focus. Her face is tinted a cold blue as if, perhaps, this is a vision of someone already dead. The stylised and particular vision of Kato's work seems to refer to the culture of Japanese Manga with its preoccupation with idealised forms and youthful beauty, but also to Surrealism, in particular, perhaps to the dolls of Hans Bellmer or the fantasies of Dali.

Mika Kato has exhibited internationally including Fondation Cartier, Paris; Des Moines Art Centre, Iowa; Palm Beach ICA, Florida and SMAK, Gent. In 2004 she won the Shinjin Prize for most promising young artist at Roppongi Crossing, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

image: a work by Mika Kato

Opening Thursday 20 January 6-8pm

White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB
White Cube is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm. For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on 020 7930 5373.
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Martin Kobe
Loomings

Inside the White Cube is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by German artist Martin Kobe . Kobe is a painter whose works depict dynamic architectural visions: impossible virtual spaces that while meticulously painted, also seem provisional and in the process of breaking down. Interior and exterior views are compressed using interlocking horizontal planes, sharp, vertiginous walls and ceilings inter-cut with balconies, picture windows and coulisses , leading the eye all around the canvas. Kobe's palette is vibrant but restricted, mostly consisting of deep reds, silver and acid green that enhance the emptiness in the work: an atmosphere of utopianism devoid of everyday realism.

Kobe makes his paintings using many layers of paint, built up to create chromatically varied and rich areas of colour that are kept in place by masking tape. In this way, there is an element of painterly collage, of different viewpoints, buildings and trajectories being compressed together in one image. The buildings are sometimes unfinished, without roofs or walls, provisional support structures that are like scaffolds for the picture itself. Different areas of the paintings are handled in different ways – mostly, it is applied in a perfectly smooth, flat manner, the blocks of colour working against the depth or reduction of space in the composition. At other times, it is modulated – a rectangular mirror pool of water, for example, is mottled and indistinct, since the paint has been dragged or squeezed onto the surface.

In some works the trace of the human hand has been mostly elided, although parts of the canvas are left unfinished, a kind of intervention in the hermetic surface of the picture. In this way, the works introduce an element of human error, a kind of elapse, an entry point for the viewer. In another work, a ceiling or floor – it is unapparent which – is made up of rectangular pod-like structures, sculptural steel trays which seem filled with black liquid. The shadows are unrelentingly black making the buildings seem otherworldly, un-naturalistic and fantastical.

The structures in these pictures reference architectural modernism, and its emphasis on sheer horizontality, open-plan living, and visually bisecting lines. But rather than suggesting support structures for daily life, these are non-specific places referencing the corporate architecture of new towns, world fairs or airports: the accumulated blank interstices in the modern world. Kobe's paintings seem to borrow from several sources, not least the seamless style of popular science fiction, as well as a tradition of abstraction in Modernist painting.

Martin Kobe has been in group and solo exhibitions in Germany, UK and USA. He has recently exhibited at Museum für Bildende Künste, Leipzig and East International, Norwich.

Opening Thursday 20 January 6-8pm

Inside the White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB
Open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am – 6pm.
For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on 020 79305373.

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