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As part of the fair’s prestigious KABINETT section, Kavi Gupta's booth will include a spectacular installation of new paintings and a large-scale metal sculpture by Tomokazu Matsuyama, whose largest American solo exhibition to date recently concluded at Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St, and whose large-scale public sculptures are currently featured in the Istanbul Biennial.Runner, debuted in The Best Part About Us, Tomokazu Matsuyama’s 2022 solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta gallery in Chicago. The form is highly abstracted, offering not so much a narrative expression of a runner, but rather a poetic incarnation of certain ideas about the function and cultural meaning of running as part of human culture. Viewed from certain angles, the sculpture reveals aspects of a human form, such as a head, arms, and feet that don a pair of athletic shoes. Other aspects of the form are intended to convey movement and action.
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Tomokazu Matsuyama
Runner, 2021 -
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This work is a companion to a sculpture titled Dancer. Matsuyama placed these two forms in the same space as an expression of how dancing and running are separate activities that nonetheless express similar human interests. Dancing is more prevalent in Eastern Culture, while running is more a part of Western culture. Nonetheless both activities allow people to express similar human ideals. Matsuyama’s sculptural practice is informed by his process of questioning how his imagery might be experienced by viewers in three-dimensional space. He contemplates the total optical experience of his paintings and the logical relationships of the formal elements within them, creating mirrored forms and patterns that serve as an optical metaphor for his vision of cultural exchange and influence.The effect event extends beyond the piece, as its surfaces will take on the colors of its environment. Simultaneously familiar and alien, Matsu’s sculptures hint exquisitely at the worlds we know, if not from life then from a memory or from a dream. Hand welded from sheets of stainless steel and hand buffed to a mirror shine, these fragmented, labyrinthine forms are frozen in gestures that, again, relate to the “global us.” In their distorted, curvilinear surfaces we see ourselves and wonder, like a glimpse into the Matrix, which side of the mirror is real.
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TOMOKAZU MATSUYAMA
A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama has developed a singular aesthetic grounded in an elegant expression of what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” As a bi-cultural visual artist, he is keenly aware of the nomadic diaspora, a community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects.
Though he manages a dynamic, wide ranging, and truly global practice that includes painting, sculpture, and large-scale public works, Matsuyama notably remains dedicated to furthering the most personal and intimate aspects of his aesthetic evolution. Each painting that leaves his studio is the fulfillment of hundreds of hours of work, as intensive research into source imagery converges with the application of innumerable layers of custom blended paint. The astoundingly vivid surfaces of his paintings project an almost digital brilliance, yet, upon close inspection, a painterly reality becomes clear, as hand-made brush strokes intermingle with delicately drawn figures, gestural splotches and drips, and meticulously spray-gunned backgrounds.
Matsuyama received his MFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include The Tomokazu Matsuyama: The Best Part About Us, Kavi Gupta, Chicgao, IL; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Accountable Nature, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China; Tomokazu Matsuyama: No Place Like Home, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Oh Magic Night, Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong; Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints, Japan Society, New York, NY, USA; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Palimpsest, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Thousand Regards, Katzen Arts Center at American University Museum, Washington, DC, USA; and Made in 17 hours, Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia, among others.Public displays of Matsuyama's work include a monumental, permanent sculptural installation, activating Shinjuku Station East Square, Tokyo, Japan, one of the busiest urban train stations in the world, as well as acclaimed, large-scale public commissions in Beverly Hills, CA, and in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan, mobilizing Matsuyama's signature examinations of bi-cultralism and pop culture.Matsuyama’s works are in the permanent collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; the Royal Family of Dubai; Dean Collection (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), USA; the institutional collections of Microsoft, Toyota Automobile, Bank of Sharjah, NIKE Japan, and Levi’sStrauss and Co. Japan; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA, USA; Pt. Leo Estate Sculpture Park, Melbourne, Australia; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Xiao Museum, Suzhou, China; among others.
Kabinett ABMB 2022 | Tomokazu Matsuyama: Tomokazu Matsuyama, Runner, 2021
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