Fumie Sasabuchi
13 Jan - 29 Feb 2012
FUMIE SASABUCHI
13 January - 29 February, 2012
ANDREAS GRIMM MUNCHEN is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition at our gallery of Japanese artist Fumie Sasabuchi. The exhibition showcases new paintings and sculptures. The artist was born in 1975 in Tokyo and studied at the renowned Tama Art University in Tokyo (1995 – 1999), before transferring to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (2000 – 2006). Fumie Sasabuchi lives and works in Berlin.
A central theme for the artist is the recurring female body. While in her earlier works she exposed the bones and innards of female supermodels by inscribing them onto retouched fashion photography, she now embeds her female figures into a cosmic structure. Anonymized female figures are located in surrealistic landscapes and get merged with celestial bodies creating colossal, almost monstrous deities. Nevertheless Sasabuchi’s ethereal figures always remain vulnerable and literally organic beings (note the “Moon Lady” with the inscribed lungs). The artist’s imagery feeds itself from different sources, be it movies, especially Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or paintings by the Surrealists. With the latter ones Sasabuchi also shares the tendency to cipher her image content resulting in works of art that raise more questions than they answer: What do these women want? Are they a symbol for strength, weakness or maybe both? Is it an antiquated Romanticism or an accurate account of female identity in the 21st century? Even though the paintings do not give an explicit answer to any of these questions, they are successful as they force the viewer to deal with the immanent important subject of gender roles.
If the women paintings indicate a turn towards Surrealism, the other exhibited works refer to another outgrowth of surrealistic style: the Pitture Metafisica. The isolated head of a doll as well as the geometrical representation of the “seeing eye” allude clearly to the art of Giorgio de Chirico. But how is this image to be interpreted as it differs so much from the other paintings? The Pittura Metafisica was concerned about creating an eternal form of art, a timeless style. With that in mind one can maybe see a connection to the paintings of the female figures and read the “doll head” painting as an ironic and almost cynical comment on how fixated and constricted the human perceptivity is. In the history of art the viewer has always been confronted with two divergent types of womanhood: the pure, beautiful, virtuous woman or the sinful, monstrous vixen. In the work of Fumie Sasabuchi these differentiations seem to be abolished as her female figures are neither Madonna-like nor are they furies, they are both and nothing, they are indefinable and unseizable.
This exhibition is made possible in cooperation with Galerie Zink Berlin.
13 January - 29 February, 2012
ANDREAS GRIMM MUNCHEN is delighted to announce the first solo exhibition at our gallery of Japanese artist Fumie Sasabuchi. The exhibition showcases new paintings and sculptures. The artist was born in 1975 in Tokyo and studied at the renowned Tama Art University in Tokyo (1995 – 1999), before transferring to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (2000 – 2006). Fumie Sasabuchi lives and works in Berlin.
A central theme for the artist is the recurring female body. While in her earlier works she exposed the bones and innards of female supermodels by inscribing them onto retouched fashion photography, she now embeds her female figures into a cosmic structure. Anonymized female figures are located in surrealistic landscapes and get merged with celestial bodies creating colossal, almost monstrous deities. Nevertheless Sasabuchi’s ethereal figures always remain vulnerable and literally organic beings (note the “Moon Lady” with the inscribed lungs). The artist’s imagery feeds itself from different sources, be it movies, especially Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” or paintings by the Surrealists. With the latter ones Sasabuchi also shares the tendency to cipher her image content resulting in works of art that raise more questions than they answer: What do these women want? Are they a symbol for strength, weakness or maybe both? Is it an antiquated Romanticism or an accurate account of female identity in the 21st century? Even though the paintings do not give an explicit answer to any of these questions, they are successful as they force the viewer to deal with the immanent important subject of gender roles.
If the women paintings indicate a turn towards Surrealism, the other exhibited works refer to another outgrowth of surrealistic style: the Pitture Metafisica. The isolated head of a doll as well as the geometrical representation of the “seeing eye” allude clearly to the art of Giorgio de Chirico. But how is this image to be interpreted as it differs so much from the other paintings? The Pittura Metafisica was concerned about creating an eternal form of art, a timeless style. With that in mind one can maybe see a connection to the paintings of the female figures and read the “doll head” painting as an ironic and almost cynical comment on how fixated and constricted the human perceptivity is. In the history of art the viewer has always been confronted with two divergent types of womanhood: the pure, beautiful, virtuous woman or the sinful, monstrous vixen. In the work of Fumie Sasabuchi these differentiations seem to be abolished as her female figures are neither Madonna-like nor are they furies, they are both and nothing, they are indefinable and unseizable.
This exhibition is made possible in cooperation with Galerie Zink Berlin.