Misaki Kawai "Sitting and Looking", 2007 Mixed media 24 x 30 x 2 inches |
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Misaki Kawai
January 12 to February 10, 2007.
Opening reception, Friday, January 12, 6-8pm.
Clementine Gallery announces the opening of a solo exhibition of new work by the artist Misaki Kawai. The show will run from January 12 to February 10, 2007. A reception for the public will be held on Friday, January 12, from 6-8 PM.
For Tiger Punch, her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Misaki Kawai presents a series of paintings and installations drawn from her personal lexicon of mythologized Americana and playful sense of humor. Inspired by iconic pop cultural phenomena such as the Beatles, R2D2, and ET, Kawai incorporates these characters into surreal dream worlds of keyed up color and joyous irreverence. In them, extraterrestrial chickens do experiments in vast underground laboratories and haphazardly constructed boats ride tsunami-sized waves, manned by crews of robots and octopi. Often, the artist's own face will appear alongside John Lennon's or C3P0's, piloting a futuristic spaceship or outsized airliner.
Cobbled together from everyday materials like cardboard and cotton balls, Kawai's work pairs a deliberately handmade aesthetic with off-kilter proportions. Paintings are stuck with bits of yarn and fabric strips, sculptures glued with tiny toys found in Chinatown dollar stores. At the same time, Kawai remains attentive to the work's formal arrangement, each gesture thoroughly considered, revealing an intuitive and sophisticated sense of space. This craft-conscious practice and careful attention to detail suffuses the work with sincerity, lending authenticity to the visual pleasure of Kawai's compositions.
Misaki Kawai will have a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, this March. Her work has been featured in two-person exhibition at the Watari Museum in Tokyo, Japan, and in Greater New York 2005, at P.S.1 MOMA. She lives and works in New York.
Misaki Kawai will be on view during regular gallery hours, Tuesday- Saturday, 11- 6 PM and by appointment. For further information and reproductions, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery at 212.243.5937 or email us at: clemgal@clementine-gallery.com.