Layers of nature
-Beyond the line-

Sezon Museum of Modern Art is located in Karuizawa, Nagano prefecture.Karuizawa is Luxury Forest Resort Area only one or two hours outside of Tokyo on the Nagano shinkansen (bullet train) line.Sezon Museum of Modern Art, through the concept of being the museum inside nature, is made to blend in the nature of Karuizawa resembling a low-rise tea-ceremony arbor. The layout of the museum was done by Kiyonori Kikutake, who is one of the leading architects of Japan.

warter lily,2008©Christian Awe

the exhibition “Layers of nature -Beyond the Line” beginning on April 2018. This exhibition will be showing: Shingo Francis, an internationally active artist who sets base in Japan and America. Christian Awe, an artist from Berlin, marking his first exposure in a Japanese museum. Sam Francis, one of the most influential abstract artists in America during the 20^thcentury. It will be a group exhibition of these three artists. it is a complex of nature and the atmosphere of museum and Modern Art.

About Artist

Shingo Francis captures the natural colors and light into his artworks by coming and going between America and Japan, like if it piles up with our layers of memories sleeping within us, the depth becomes deeper each time it is seen. Moreover, the line that is drawn straight like a horizon makes the boundary of the inner and the outer of the painting vague by the intercourse of the unique colors. What is more, he is going to show new work for this exhibition.

Christian Awe brings the fundamental figure which is discovered using various techniques, as the artist states that, “Even when painting something figurative, it starts turning into an abstract.” Regarding his new work, he creates multi-tiered space in the painting with the droplets which blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination and is complemented by expressive “splashes of color,” covering the layers below them in rivulets or with apparently spontaneous gestures.

Sam Francis, father of Shingo Francis and the master of abstract art, the colors painted using the artist’s entire body lives inside the works. Giving color to something invisible, the contrast of colors spreads out infinitely, like if it is giving birth to a new ecosystem in a white land.

If we were to call color, light, space, time, various life-forms, including those invisible things surrounding us “Nature”, their works like that nature enfolds our body. At that time, going beyond the lines drawing the outline of the individual, abstract and figurative, and the boundaries of the viewer and object, we will be feeling that our own selves too are part of the layers configuring the nature.

Bound for Eternity (Red), 2008 ©Shingo Francis

WORKSHOP

LIGHT, COLOR, ACTION – painting experience with Christian Awe and Shingo Francis
Date: August 11, 2018, 10:30am-12:00pm
Capacity: 10 pairs (child & adult/ about 20 people in total)
Age: the1st glade – the 3rd glade of elementary school (6-10years) / with an adult
Free (An exhibition ticket is required.)
Application: 1. name 2. number of people 3.Tel No./ Email/ Fax No.

＊Please apply to TEL:03-5579-9725 FAX: 03-5579-9726