Art Front Gallery is pleased to present "Inside the Gardens," an exhibition of new works by Iku Harada and Miyuki Takenaka.

A gallery space is inherently a world devoid of everyday life, a space detached from the real world, designed solely for viewing artworks. Starting from this premise, rather than forcibly drawing in elements of daily life from the outside, the gallery space might be considered relatively similar to a Western-style garden, which creates a small, self-contained sense of everyday life within itself. This exhibition features two artists who create small, garden-like spaces within their respective works.

This exhibition marks Harada's first time exhibiting at Art Front Gallery. He creates virtual worlds within his computer, building houses and parks within them, and continuously painting landscapes as seen from within these virtual spaces. These spaces also include galleries, and the walls of these imaginary galleries are adorned with landscape paintings depicting the surrounding scenery. A characteristic of Harada's work is that he replaces his simulated space with a real canvas for exhibition, and his exhibition methods also emphasize the coexistence of real and virtual spaces, sometimes twisting the exhibition space itself by placing the canvas on the floor.

Meanwhile, Takenaka, whose work we have featured in this gallery before, is known for his motifs reminiscent of plant seeds and sprouts, and for his use of light and shadow in organic acrylic resin. Recently, however, he seems to be evolving his unique style by making acrylic layers more complex, incorporating different materials, and shifting his starting point from the concept of a flat surface hung on a wall to combining layers and drawings. In an exhibition at the Ganka Gallery a few months ago, he created a work in which acrylic was stacked three-dimensionally in a tower-like structure, and each piece appears to change over time as it reacts to spotlights and natural light within the space.

The works of the two artists are self-contained and form their own closed gardens, but in an exhibition, the works as "objects" become components of the gallery, which is a garden. As we walk through them and view the works, we are undoubtedly part of everyday life. Harada's work moves between the real world and the virtual world, and Takenaka's work, which captures light and other elements to show changes within his own work, and the space in which they are arranged, should open up and rise up into our everyday reality as we interact with them.

Art Front Gallery, Toshiro Kondo

Related Sites