Annely Juda Fine Art is delighted to present a series of new paintings by Yuko Shiraishi direct from her London studio. This online exhibition coincides with Shiraishi’s solo exhibition Space at East Gallery, Norwich running from July 20th – September 18th 2021.
Paintings in this exhibition mark a new direction for the artist. The global pandemic and various lockdowns have influenced Shiraishi’s work. “I wanted to make something seductive and light but with strength”, she says. Circles and dots have appeared in the artist’s work before, but here they take a different form; either bold discs (‘Brief Encounter’) or delicate circular forms with dotted halos in the new ‘Particle Paintings’. In works such as ‘Purple Day’ or ‘Benediction’, Shiraishi returns to bands of colour, both horizontal and vertical, all subtly layered to reveal nuances of colour.
Shiraishi’s stunning use of colour, tone and composition make her works seductive to the eye and the senses yet at the same time fascinate as intellectual explorations into the formal language of painting. Colour comes totally instinctively and is not representational, “like a ball that’s coming at you and you have to escape; I almost don’t think.”
Bands of contrasting colours and tones, ranging from delicate layered organic brushwork to sections of heavier grainy and combed surfaces interplay to create formal rather than illusionistic space. Nuances of light and colour break through from subtle layers of underpainting. Whilst this pre-occupation with the formal qualities of paint and composition roots Shiraishi’s work in the genre of American abstract and colour field painting, her works are sensual and evocative. Shiraishi considers the recent ‘Particle Paintings’ as having the lightness of drawing on paper (although Shiraishi never does preparatory drawings for her paintings; she considers them alive and doesn’t pre-plan any element). Dots originally appeared in her work as a marker to make lines, and she decided to bring them to the foreground. As Shiraishi says, she’s interested in the things that you can’t see.
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Yuko ShiraishiPurple Day, 2021oil on canvas195 x 168 cm -
Yuko ShiraishiPick Up Piece, 2021oil on canvas137 x 122 cm
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Yuko ShiraishiBenediction, 2021oil on canvas90 x 85 cm
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Yuko Shiraishi
Space Elevator Tea House 2009
wood, painted and stainless steel tubing, electro-luminescent cable, perspex and fluorescent lights
312 x 330 x 300 cmSpace
East Gallery, Norwich University of the ArtsIn her solo exhibition Space for East GalleryNUA, artist Yuko Shiraishi recreates her visionary architectural installation Space Elevator Tea House. The exhibition draws on a number of contemporary, topical themes such as space exploration, scientific endeavour, tradition and modernity. It also acknowledges the past year as an extraordinary time in which we have been forced to consider the space around ourselves, and our connection to the immediate environment and travel.
Made from stainless steel tubes and plexiglass the construction is a skeletal ghost building - replicating the form of an early 17th-century traditional Japanese tea house, but also posing as a vehicle into space. Shiraishi’s inspiration for the project comes from Arthur C Clarke's novel Fountains of Paradise in which the transportation of people and objects into space is made possible on a rigid metal ribbon.
In addition to this, the exhibition will present three new paintings by Shiraishi produced in 2020.
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Yuko Shiraishi was born in Tokyo in 1956 and moved to London to study painting at Chelsea School of Art in 1978. She lives and works in London.
Shiraishi has exhibited widely including the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Japan and her works are held in major public collections and museums around the world. These include; Arts Council of Great Britain, British Museum, Government Art Collection, London; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield UK; Max Bill-George Vantongerloo Foundation, Zumikon, Switzerland; Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany; McCrory Corporation, New York, USA; Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest, Hungary; The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Ohara Museum, Kurashiki; Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan.
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"I'm interested in the things you can't see. When you look out to see you see a horizontal line between the sea and the sky. But the sea is full of life and the sky is full of particles. There is never total nothingness."
