With this edition, the Kanazawa Youth Dream Challenge Art Programme (*1) breaks new ground by setting its sights on an overseas artist.

The Program invites the young, internationally recognized, UK-based artist Peter McDonald to develop an art project for the first time in Japan, marking the first international edition of the Program. Through the “act of drawing,” McDonald, at the core of the project, rubs shoulders with others, lightly traversing the boundary between genres, genders, countries and the everyday and the extraordinary. As young people (*2) participate in the work, they experience the diversity of and possibilities for communication. Beginning with a painting exhibition and the production of a wall installation at the museum, various extemporaneous programs will be held using the exhibition space as a stage. As McDonald interacts with the city and the people of Kanazawa, his painted world will permeate the city, establishing pliable connections between one person and another, and between people and places through the fundamental language of expression we know as painting.

About the Artist

McDonald, who also produced paintings while in the sculpture department at art university, captures the act of painting as performance. In 2002, while painting a series of works based on performers on stage, a character with a large head appeared. Thereafter, with the image of this character at the core of his visual language, he expresses, with abbreviated (or simplified) iconography and rich colors, everyday situations. These have included: concerts, airports, a bakery, hair salons, classrooms, museums and cafés among many others. He has also referenced the creativity of historical painters such as Matisse and Lucio Fontana. The illusion of transparency created by a layering of color upon color and clarity of composition highlight the openness of the work, the surface of which, cloaked in vivid colors, takes on a sense of floating. The figurative and the abstract merge, and the whimsical two-dimensional world that emerges from the logical illustrations evokes various memories or stories. Peter McDonald has a Japanese mother and a British father, and the richly colored world of his artistic practice, with “painting” as a unique means of communication, has the power to make us acknowledge again that for human beings “drawing” is a fundamental language of expression. McDonald was the winner of the UK's John Moores Painting Prize
in 2008.