Dates: Feb14 – Ma 13, 2004

“…The figures seem to be dancing in this unconscious realm between dreaming and waking. They are beings whose very existence is unspecific and neutral.”
Hiromi Kitazawa
(from the catalogue for Girls Don’t Cry, PARCO Museum, 2003

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce To The Mountain Lake, artist Kyoko Murase’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. A graduate of the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, Murase currently resides in Germany. The artist’s work has been included in numerous recent museum exhibitions including Fiction, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2002, Girls Don’t Cry, Parco Museum, 2003, and will be featured in the upcoming exhibitions, Roppongi Crossing, Mori Art Museum, 2004 and The Time of Our Life, Tokyo Opera City, 2004.

Kyoko Murase’s installations interweave paintings, drawings and site-specific wall pieces to create an immersive environment; a space which articulates the artist’s highly personal and lyrical language of the daydream. “Imagine you dive into water, chase after butterflies, or take a nap in the forest; all is quiet, and then suddenly a lake appears before you…This is the sort of mood I want to create,” states the artist. This mood is achieved, in part, through the artist’s use of repetition. In a slowly evolving body of work, developed over a series of exhibitions, Murase has focused on an androgynous figure placed within a fluid, dreamlike natural landscape. A clear distinction between figure and landscape is literally blurred through Murase’s free handling of color and brushstroke. The intimate relationship -and sometimes identification- between a being and it’s surroundings is presented in the gentle yet insistent language of a dream.

The release of the publication of Apu Apu, a collaboration between Kyoko Murase and writer Fukunaga Shin, is anticipated in March, 2004. Please contact the gallery for details.

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