Post by joshualinergallery on Apr 8, 2009 13:05:54 GMT -8
Our new exhibit with AIKO (Nakagawa) opens Saturday April 18th from 6-9 pm.
AIKO will have a new series of large mixed media works on canvas, stencil work on found cabinet doors and windows as well as a large series of hand painted spray cans.
See attached press release and sample images below.
Preview link will be sent out next week.
Thanks - Josh
Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present 'Love Monster', an exhibition of new mixedmedia
works by the Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based artist AIKO. 'Love Monster' is AIKO’s first solo outing at the gallery
and her largest show to date.
As a founding member of the artist collective FAILE, formed in 1999, AIKO helped fuel the current wave of global
contemporary street art with spontaneous wheatpastings and stenciling in numerous world capitals. The artist
launched a solo career in 2006 with works on canvas that incorporate collage, stenciling, brushwork, spray paint,
and serigraphy. This bricolage technique perfectly suits AIKO’s eclectic practice—a voracious mash-up of
Japanese and American pop culture, including comics, children’s book illustrations, advertising, classic movie
posters, and soft-core pornography.
AIKO draws inspiration from the urban street, Kawaii culture (“cute” in Japanese), and globalized depictions of
female sexuality. While a Media Studies student at New School University in New York, she hid her art in plain sight
by wheatpasting images throughout the city. It was then that she developed a signature synthesis of commercial
graphics, sexual imagery, and the vocabularies of seduction and fantasy found in print, film, and electronic media.
The implied decay of the graffiti-style works reads not only as autobiography but also as a subtle breakdown of
surrounding structures. 'Welcome to the Planet of Lady A', for example, features a provocative soft-porn image
silkscreened onto a window, all elements reclaimed from cultural and literal junk heaps.
Like Warhol in the ’70s, AIKO embraces silkscreen techniques as the ultimate (and seemingly timeless) signifier of
the contemporary. 'Madam Butterfly' elegantly combines a reproduced newspaper image with collaged decorative
motifs, masking and transforming the identity of the painting’s female subject. In the show’s title work, 'Love
Monster', the artist layers nude nymphets holding spray paint with the recurring tags “King” and “Knights” to
capture not only the relational aesthetics of the day but also contemporary culture’s relative ethics. Here and
elsewhere, her visual language borrows from fairytales and pulp fiction—virgins and vixens—exploring themes
of romance, morality, and religion. Yet AIKO’s energetic works eschew judgment in favor of something more
generative, a pop-culture phoenix rising from the real and virtual ashes of the urban street.
AIKO
Madam Butterfly
Mixed media on canvas
56 x 78 inches
AIKO
Love Monster
Mixed media on canvas
66 x 62 inches
AIKO
Welcome to the Planet of Lady A
Mixed media on found window
36 x 28 inches
AIKO will have a new series of large mixed media works on canvas, stencil work on found cabinet doors and windows as well as a large series of hand painted spray cans.
See attached press release and sample images below.
Preview link will be sent out next week.
Thanks - Josh
Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present 'Love Monster', an exhibition of new mixedmedia
works by the Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based artist AIKO. 'Love Monster' is AIKO’s first solo outing at the gallery
and her largest show to date.
As a founding member of the artist collective FAILE, formed in 1999, AIKO helped fuel the current wave of global
contemporary street art with spontaneous wheatpastings and stenciling in numerous world capitals. The artist
launched a solo career in 2006 with works on canvas that incorporate collage, stenciling, brushwork, spray paint,
and serigraphy. This bricolage technique perfectly suits AIKO’s eclectic practice—a voracious mash-up of
Japanese and American pop culture, including comics, children’s book illustrations, advertising, classic movie
posters, and soft-core pornography.
AIKO draws inspiration from the urban street, Kawaii culture (“cute” in Japanese), and globalized depictions of
female sexuality. While a Media Studies student at New School University in New York, she hid her art in plain sight
by wheatpasting images throughout the city. It was then that she developed a signature synthesis of commercial
graphics, sexual imagery, and the vocabularies of seduction and fantasy found in print, film, and electronic media.
The implied decay of the graffiti-style works reads not only as autobiography but also as a subtle breakdown of
surrounding structures. 'Welcome to the Planet of Lady A', for example, features a provocative soft-porn image
silkscreened onto a window, all elements reclaimed from cultural and literal junk heaps.
Like Warhol in the ’70s, AIKO embraces silkscreen techniques as the ultimate (and seemingly timeless) signifier of
the contemporary. 'Madam Butterfly' elegantly combines a reproduced newspaper image with collaged decorative
motifs, masking and transforming the identity of the painting’s female subject. In the show’s title work, 'Love
Monster', the artist layers nude nymphets holding spray paint with the recurring tags “King” and “Knights” to
capture not only the relational aesthetics of the day but also contemporary culture’s relative ethics. Here and
elsewhere, her visual language borrows from fairytales and pulp fiction—virgins and vixens—exploring themes
of romance, morality, and religion. Yet AIKO’s energetic works eschew judgment in favor of something more
generative, a pop-culture phoenix rising from the real and virtual ashes of the urban street.
AIKO
Madam Butterfly
Mixed media on canvas
56 x 78 inches
AIKO
Love Monster
Mixed media on canvas
66 x 62 inches
AIKO
Welcome to the Planet of Lady A
Mixed media on found window
36 x 28 inches
