Toru Kuwakubo

Toru Kuwakubo

Scenery of Tomorrow
October 18th – November 17th, 2007

Opening
Thursday, October 18th at 5-8 pm

PRESS RELEASE (Danish version below)
It is with great pleasure that bendixen contemporary art, in cooperation with Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo, welcomes you to the opening of an exhibition of new works by the Japanese painter Toru Kuwakubo.

From a purely stylistic point of view, the thickly applied paint of Toru Kuwakubo’s works demonstrates his genuine pleasure in as well as mastery of the impressionists’ painterly technique. His canvasses are covered with the rich texture of oil paint in a brilliant dabbling of small and large brushstrokes, making each and every stroke and color a clear and significant part of the painting’s whole. Kuwakubo’s love for the great impressionist painters is, however, not just about surface or pure technique. His paintings are just as much an evidence of the fact that the strength of art lies in its sensibility, its ability to express a feeling, a moment in time or an open narrative that gives rise to the spectator’s own reflections. It is often the beach, the sea or the sky that forms the background of Kuwakubo’s poetic stories. But unlike post-impressionist painters, such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, were there is a tension between the real and the ideal, we find in Kuwakubo’s poetic narrations an acceptance of the fact that each and one of us construes our own reality at the crossroads between past and present; a realisation that life itself is the equilibrium between our ideals and the harsh facts of reality. Therefore the sometimes pointed titles seem a surprising contrast to Kuwakubo’s seemingly classical paintings. In its own sensitive way the titles reveal an interest in the political and social turbulence of the contemporary world.

Toru Kuwakubo (1978) was born in Kanazawa and lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. In 2002 he graduated from Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan and has since achieved wide recognition in the art world. He won first prize at the public Tokyo Wonder Wall competition in 2002, which was sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. He became part of Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo in 2004 and has already had several solo shows in Japan, Korea, Germany and now Denmark.

• Bendixen Art