Alexander Gelman is an American artist based in New York and Tokyo. His work is included in public and private collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Bibliotheque National de France and other major museums all around the world. Employing various media, Gelman challenges the boundaries between art, science and popular culture.

As he has been publishing his works mostly in New York and Tokyo in recent years, it is going to be his first solo exhibition in Kyoto. We are going to show Gelman’s latest work series “Shadows” which is going to be publically presented for the first time at this exhibition. Shadow series deal with ambiguity of identity with which objects alter how they look depending on angles you approach them. Shadows are images that only preserve a dimension of surface of objects and lack the significant quality of identity. Yet they also exist as two-dimensional images that possess independent shape from the objects. As much as shadows are images lack in certain information, they also indicate the possibility to us that objects could be interpreted in a completely different context. Through this duality of shadows, Gelman extracts the essence of identity of objects and ideas not by accumulating its quality but concealing a part of it.

He says his esthetic of subtraction, which excludes all the unnecessary elements and derives the essence of ideas, is the core of his creational process which people call “the ultimate simplicity connotes profound and complex meaning and interpretation”. And we share this esthetic of subtraction in our sense of “Ma” (space) from Japanese culture.

Gelman shows profound sympathy and understanding toward Japanese culture. It is not superficial and exotic culture that catches his eyes. His enthusiastic interest lies in the various Japanese cultures such as Japanese crafts, art, martial arts, performing arts and way of incense, and through them he contemplates the principle of philosophy and esthetic of Japan inherited ceaselessly.