Art Front Gallery will hold an exhibition entitled Inside the Garden to show new works by two artists, Iku Harada and Miyuki Takenaka.

Gallery spaces, by nature, do not have much sense of life. They are places to view works, detached from the real world. Actually, in this, perhaps, they resemble the Western-style garden, which also attempts to form a kind of everyday zone in a reduced area, unconnected to the outside world. The exhibition deals with two artists who create garden-like spaces.

This is Harada’s first exhibition at Art Front Gallery. Her method is to draw scenery viewed virtually, her houses and parks are created in computers. She then replaces the virtual image with real canvases. Virtual and real intertwine in her work, which she sometimes places on the floor, as if to twist the exhibition area.

The other artist, Takenaka is known for motifs reminiscent of seeds and sprouts, and for organic works using light and shadow, created in acrylic. Her recent work, with more complex layering and use of new materials, has broken beyond the two dimensionality of walls. She has evolved a style with a combination of layering and drawing.

Although each artist’s work is complete and creates a kind of garden by itself, here they are positioned within the closed garden-like world, which is the space of a gallery. Walking among them, we are surely part of everyday life. Harada’s work traverses both virtual and real worlds, while Takenaka picks up light, and both will open up our everyday lives as we interact with them in this space.

- Toshio Kondo, Art Front Gallery