YUKA TSURUNO is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition "scribble" by Nobuyuki Osaki from July 7 to August 11, 2012.
Nobuyuki Osaki’s practice relies on a variety of different methods and materials including painting, sculpture and video to produce works with extremely varied forms and appearances, simultaneously and in parallel with each other. By employing a unique and original working process that he calls “meta-real/meta-fiction”, which addresses our personal sense of reality within the context of contemporary society, Osaki attempts to highlight the uncertain and unreliable nature of reality in this world. Some of his most recent representative works include “The World”, an animated painting shown at his last solo show which depicts a landscape of mountains and waterfalls that gradually melts away. Also significant are pieces from his Portraits series, displayed at solo presentations held at Kunsthaus Hamburg and Art Fair Tokyo, which similarly portray paintings and drawings of human faces that dissolve over time. For this exhibition at YUKA TSURUNO, however, Osaki will unveil a new installation of works from his Dimension Wall series, which presents a completely different appearance to the viewer.
“Dimension Wall” uses the motif of the wall in an attempt to depict the world we live in as an ambiguous space. As the patterns and images on the wall flow out in a muddy torrent, this work portrays a series of instants that flip and reverse the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space, as well as figure and ground. As time passes, this flood of imagery gradually expands to fill the screen. Finally, the video installation blacks out, forcing our perception and consciousness to acknowledge that “all is not as it seems”, thereby unhinging our sense of the stability and certainty of this world. Similar to Osaki’s other works, these videos were not produced by the physical operations of a CG program. Instead, the artist expresses the conditions of our own reality by actually manufacturing and then filming these situations.
Regarding his new work, “scribble”, Osaki had this to say:
“What I tried to develop here was a space in which an assortment of scrawled, graffiti-like marks on the wall with no particular meaning dissolve and flow out. These marks seem to emerge spontaneously out of a pen that has been nonchalantly left uncapped. Whenever I look back at the rough notebook that I always carry around with me, I find a whole swathe of images that most other people would only be able to describe as scrawls or scribbles – things that I might have drawn just to get the ink flowing, or images I had in my head that never materialized, and ended up being just an inexplicable, scrawled trace or vestige that got stranded along the way. The title of the exhibition, “Scribble”, refers to these graffiti-like marks. What I wanted to do with this exhibition, however, was to allow these “failed” images to address the boundaries between perception and consciousness, and the uncertainties of the world we live in.”
Nobuyuki Osaki was born in Osaka in 1975 and received MFA from Graduate School of Kyoto City University of Arts. Osaki began producing work inspired by the idea of a personal reality while still an art student. Many of his earlier works consisted of prints and paintings. By extending the range of his chosen techniques to sculpture and installation starting in 2002, and video in 2005, he has pursued a practice that yields greater insight into the themes of the “meta-real” and “meta-fiction”. Recent exhibitions include "12th Japan Media Arts Festival" The National Art Center, Tokyo (2009); "Exhibition as media 2009, drowning room", Kobe Art Village Center, Kobe (2009); "Haut. Mythos und Medium", Kunsthaus, Hamburg (2009); "The Position 2012, Contemporary Art from Nagoya", Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi (2012). Osaki will also participate in “Contemporary Painting – Eye of the Curator” (tentative title), which will be held later this fall at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.
Also featured will be Osaki’s video piece “Portraits of Mirror”, concurrently on display at NADiff’s window gallery from June 26 (Tue) through July 16 (Mon). This work is part of his Portraits series of melting faces, and consists of an installation of images projected using the reflections of these faces in a mirror. In addition, Osaki’s first monograph of collected works from recent years will also be published in conjunction with this exhibition.
