Past Exhibitions
Nonplace Overlay
2nd-9th September 2008Stanley Projects is pleased to announce the first UK solo show by Yutaka Inagawa, a Japanese-born artist living in London who has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work explores the psychosocial fragmentation of the everyday through mixed media painting and collage.
The exhibition shows a series of new works completed within a year exploring the given spaces of the artist's memory, whilst further developing his vocabulary of media and techniques. Inagawa plays with the genres of image building: traditional materials are appropriated for contemporary subjects, revered media subverted through apparently casual treatment. His ink line drawings disconnect their subjects from meaning, highlighting the emptiness of pre-existing connotations.
His extensive collection of photo images of the everyday, are often integrated onto canvas directly as photo transfers, creating a montage of objects. Conversely, Inagawa also manipulates the urgent quality of acrylic, as well as the improvisational nature of oil paint to render these instant moments with painted gestures. The purpose of such mixed media works, which combine photo and paint, is to express the familiar sense of everyday scenery, not only through the images themselves, but also through the textures, tonal information and movement articulated by the medium. This layered imagery is unbalanced, creating unsettling associations.
His use of paint is often more akin to spontaneous drawing, leaving large unpainted voids. These blanks with pencil lines can be read as a performative act, a transparent exploitation of the unconscious state through conscious action. In reflecting both the culturally specific and nonspecific elements of his surroundings the artist imbues the work with a timeless quality. Overlayed tragicomic signs are composed to divert any formation of narrative. By doing so, he describes the current form of the 'everyday' a state superimposed by an overlay of deconstructed meanings through generations, culture, languages, and personal memories.
Yutaka Inagawa was born in Tokyo, and has lived and worked in London since 2000. Exhibited in Seoul, Paris, New York, Tokyo and has collaborative work featured on the cover of Wound Magazine (issue 3) together with a special feature included within. Currently on Japanese Government Overseas Study Programme for Artists.