Dates: Mar 14 – May 10, 2020
Location: SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery, Hong Kong
By appointment only.

SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “Blue Child and Slow Walk”, a two-person exhibition featuring Tomoo Gokita and Kyoko Murase, from March 14 – May 10, 2020. Along with the artists’ original drawings, six large-scale wall silhouettes installations will spread across the space to create an immersive experience for visitors.

Tomoo Gokita’s creative expressions always bring a fresh visual experience beyond the imagination of the viewer.  Fast and fierce, the artist has completed eighteen ink drawings in full strength and concentration for this exhibition. “The Slow Walk” (2020), an abstract drawing executed in bold and rhythmic brushstrokes, will be enlarged as a black cut-out silhouette, together with other two figurative works selected from the series, “Josei” (2020) and “Yosomi” (2020). As suggested by its title, the “Josei” series depict the face profile of women. Rendered in a hybrid style of Minimalism and Cubism, the linear portrait motif is further developed in groups as seen in the playful “Yosomi” series.

Kyoko Murase’s richly colored semi-abstractions embody the mysterious natural world. A caressing presence is conveyed through the traces of her carefree brushstrokes and subtle color gradation, that evoke viewers’ body sensations of the flow of water, touch of the breeze in the woods and the delights in nature. With “Blue Child” (2017) transcribed into three large sized silhouettes installed side by side, Murase creates an ever-more expansive landscape in which creeping vines and tree branches stretch over a saturated surface in linear repetition, enveloping her characteristic young girl motif in a blue forest. This motif is described by Murase as an “entrance to the picture”, a visual invitation to all of us, to share the artist’s own body sensations.

Tomoo Gokita

Tomoo Gokita was born in 1969 in Tokyo where he is based. His drawings made with pencil, charcoal and ink on paper first began to receive attention in the late 1990s. In 2000, Lingerie Wrestling, a book collecting the same works was published. After an exhibition in New York, his works were featured in numerous solo exhibitions in Japan and abroad. Gokita uses acrylic gouache to create uniquely even surfaces in his paintings. Gokita absorbed extraordinarily wide range of elements from various styles in his own way.
In 2012, his work was featured in “The Unseen Relationship: Form and Abstraction” at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. In 2014, “THE GREAT CIRCUS”, a solo exhibition of Gokita’s works, was held at the same museum. In April 2018, his solo exhibition “PEEKABOO” was held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. His first solo exhibition with the gallery was held in 2008 and later solo presentations at the gallery include “Variety Show” (2012) and “Holy Cow” (2017).

Kyoko Murase

Kyoko Murase was born in Gifu in 1963. She graduated from the Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, where she also completed her postgraduate studies in 1989. She subsequently studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1990 and 1996, and completed a Meisterschuler from Konrad Klapheck in 1993. In 2016, she returned to Japan from Düsseldorf where she had lived for 26 years. Murase currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Her major solo exhibitions include “park,” Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2019); “Painting and … vol.3 Kyoko Murase,” Gallery αM, Tokyo (2018); “Cloud Shapes Made of Mud from the Sea,” Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2013); “Fluttering far away,” the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi (2010); “Cicada and horned owl,” the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, Shizuoka (2007). Her major group exhibitions include “Garden of Painting: Japanese Art of the 00s,” The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2010); “In the Little Playground: Hitsuda Nobuya and his surrounding students,” the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art and the Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi (2009); “Red Hot: Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2007); “Roppongi Crossing,” the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2004); “MOT Annual 2002 – Fiction? Painting the reality in the Age of the Virtual -,” the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

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