Exhibition Review: Luhring Augustine Gallery "Yasumasa Morimura Charles Atlas: Anamneses"

24th Street in Chesea is very nice this month with great exhibitions. I will share two exhibitions from two galleries on this street in this and next blog.

The first one is Yasumasa Morimura's photographic works, which are currently on view at Luhring Augusrine Gallery on 24th street in Chelsea. This time I'm focused on work on Yasumasa Morimura, but make sure to check the Charles Atlas's work too when you visit them.

In the living productive Japanese artists today, the work of Mr. Yasumasa Morimura, there is something in his work and his consistent attempts that fascinate me forever. I appreciate that we live at the same time, even though our generations are different.

I enjoy a kind of art that an artist doesn't hesitate to involve in it in their personal ways. His work hires many notable artworks and landscapes from the past, but surely every one of them is a new work of contemporary art. His works are more mixed media work than simply "photography".

The first time I saw his work was at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Tokyo Japan. 

This exhibition is focused on the female figures in art history which he places himself in the position and recreates the image. I always like that although he applies heavy make-up to his face and paints in the shadows, so that he looks close to the figure in the painting or photography, he keeps his hands and other body parts relatively unchanged, which reminds us of the male figure of the artist.

 

Some of them like this one, I'm not sure if they are edited after photographed. 

I ienjoy no matter what he 

This is perhaps the main work of this exhibition by Mr. Morimura's side (as this is a two artists' exhibition). He is always great at inviting irony and a coony or sharp-witted twist to the image. The seriousness she displays in his figure always adds funny-ness to it, at least to me. It is like between not taking it seriously and taking it pretty seriously. The balance of it is like Dali to me, the performance elements in his photographic and video works are always unique. 

Maneki-neko Statue/figure

The painting above is a good example of his work where he paints his face to create the shadow. This is a very photography oriented method which he, I believe, only uses in his photography, not in his video work.

The text below is from press release by Luhring Augustne Gallery:

On display in the main gallery will be a selection of new and exemplary works by Morimura that span the artist’s over four-decade career. The presentation will highlight his signature approach to reinventing and reimagining iconic imagery, largely pulled from the Western cultural canon — references ranging from artistic masterpieces and historic photographs to film and pop-culture. Gender and cultures coalesce and conflate in Morimura’s ingenious transformations of himself, creating subversions to assumptions related to these subjects. Through his depiction of female stars and characters, Morimura subverts the concept of the “male gaze”; within each image he both challenges the authority of identity and overturns the traditional scope of self-portraiture.