EXHIBITION

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Imura art gallery is pleased to announce Rimpa Reflection, a solo exhibition by Nippon-ga artist Taro Yamamoto.


Since 1999, when he advocated “Nippon-ga,” a fusion of Japanese classical painting with contemporary styles, Taro Yamamoto has produced a large body of works that are traditional, but also rich in innovative style. Recently, Yamamoto has been working on a new Nippon-ga project called NEO UKIYOE, in which he focuses on ukiyo-e, but gives the images a pop art arrangement.


This exhibition presents the artist’s NEO UKIYOE  works along with his new Flowers Iris series, inspired by the folding screen masterpiece Irises by Ogata Korin, who is known for perfecting the Rimpa style. Yamamoto aims to incorporate a contemporary sense of color and design into motifs that are very familiar to Japanese viewers, featuring irises, groups of plants with deep blue and bluish-green colors, rhythmically arranged in ornate pictures in which lavish use is made of gold leaf.


Andy Warhol’s Flowers series is an example of the influence of such ideas. These famous images of flowers come in many color variations. Using silk-screen printing, Warhol repeatedly produced images rendered in a two-dimensional, abstracted manner with vivid colors. Korin was also an artist who freely used this technique of repeating motifs. It is now known that Korin used stencils to reproduce some of the motifs rendered in Irises.


Discovering commonalities between Korin and Warhol, two artists who at first glance seem to be the products of completely different times and countries, Yamamoto uses his own distinctive sensibility to extract their respective properties and produce works of greater refinement. This solo exhibition reveals how Yamamoto’s new works brilliantly combine traditional iconography with a contemporary sense of color.

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山本太郎「Rimpa Reflection」

2024.07.20 (Sat.) - 2024.08.09 (Fri.) *日月祝 休廊

Opening Reception:7.20 (Sat.) 15:00-18:00

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