Artcourt Gallery is pleased to announce the ACG Collection show.
Nishino Kozo is a leading figure in a large format metal sculpture in Japan. With his unique technique and experience, he makes huge sculptures using such material as titanium, aluminum, stainless steel and iron.
Osamu Kokufu has produced large-scale sculpture that incorporate plants and entire ecosystems into vehicular motifs. To detach plants from the earth’s surface. This sort of act has become noticeable as an awareness common throughout the works Osamu Kokufu has been undertaking in recent years. Taking manmade objects such as bicycles, propellers, boat sails, parabolic antennas, and other familiar items of our modern urban lives, and joining them with plants from the natural world, at times Kokufu’s works seem, with their architectural-scale manifestations of “worlds that belong to no one”, to be completely unbounded by the standard values and sensibilities of our everyday world, like “moving gardens that wander over the earth”. Layering critical inquiry and imagination with regard to diverse energies of the past, present and future, Kokufu maintains an awareness of diverse contradictions and hardships while continually creating devices that address the basic conditions of life. He does this to gain an external view of the workings of humanity, whose habitat is limited to an extremely narrow zone on the earth’s surface, and to pose questions with regard to the energy needed to support human activity within that zone. Moreover, this work is itself the borderline between the illusions and the realities of haphazardly projected, diverse images of people living in chaotic societies, and further, a ritual of rapport for knowing oneself through interacting with plants.
Botan Yasuyoshi. Existing between humanity and object and language – whose harmonious linkages allow our everyday lives and society to function – the invisible codes of relationship that secretly control how we who live within them see things around us. Botan unearths situations that are founded on such tacit understandings and observes their workings with great attention, and at the same time, in accordance with his own rules of criterion for the visual-physical elements of contour, form and movement, he carries out ingenious rearrangements of the individual aspects of such situations and reconstructs them within his paintings. In this world of painting, where fragments of realms freed from ordinary meanings and contexts crop up like nagging riddles, there are three aspects: the paints, which are the material, the primary image elements of line, point and surface, and the images “reproduced” by these elements. Appearing in some places as non-intersecting things that occur in layers or side-by-side, elsewhere these three aspects form gradations, melting together into intimate unions. And then the contexts of meaning or narrative that are brought out through the various components of the painted surface begin, within their incomplete states, to resonate with each other, holding the consciousness of the viewer in sway with their furtive, cryptic exchanges.
Nomura Hitoshi is born in Hyogo Prefecture and graduated from Kyoto City University of Fine Art
