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.
About the Artist
Yukiko Suto was born in 1978, Kanagawa, Japan. She graduated with a BA in graphic design from Tama Art University in 2001. She is known for making finely-detailed black-and-white drawings on paper and canvas that depict scenes from residential neighborhoods in Tokyo. Suto walks around different neighborhoods and photographs images that catch her eye. She then uses the photographs as a guideline for recreating the image “as she saw it.” Concentrating on the outlines of objects, Suto creates an uncanny realism that exists somewhere between photographic veracity and individual perception.
For example, the large-scale work Landscape of 100 Bonsai (2008) depicts a residential backlot filled with rows of bonsai trees on benches that recede into the background, while the surrounding buildings and sky, just visible over the backlot’s far wall, appear oddly two-dimensional. The effect shifts the realism of the drawing—the sense of immediacy it inspires in viewers—from three-dimensional space into what might be called “an atmosphere with depth.”
Suto had a solo exhibition at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, in 2008, and was also included in the prestigious annual exhibition of emerging artists “VOCA: The Vision of Contemporary Art” at Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo. In 2007 she was featured in Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery’s “Project N” series of solo shows for emerging artists and in 2005 was a recipient of the Yasushi Fujimoto Prize at Takashi Murakami’s GEISAI #8. She will have her second exhibition with Take Ninagawa in late 2010.
