Thursday, September 25, 2014 – Saturday, October 25, 2014
529 West 20th St. 2W, New York NY 10011

Famed from the Oscar-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer, Ushio Shinohara and Noriko Shinohara return to hpgrp GALLERY NEW YORK for their joint exhibition, four years after Love Is A Roar-r-r-r!, their last hpgrp project in 2010. Having conducted a resonant dialogue in Love Is A Roar-r-r-r! In Tokyo, held at the Parco Museum in December 2013, they extend their artistic conversation in Love Is A Roar-r-r-r! Plus One, accompanied by their son Alex Kukai (who is Plus One). Together they demonstrate their versatile gifts, especially the graphic veins that represent their significant family ties.

The exhibition is curated by Reiko Tomii, an art historian who has long worked with this family of artists. She has co-curated with Hiroko Ikegami Shinohara Pops! The Avant-Garde Road, Tokyo/New York, for the Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, and organized Love Is A Roar-r-r-r! In Tokyo. In her essay, “Graphic Threesome,” published in a brochure accompanying this exhibition, she writes:

For Ushio—or Gyū-chan, as he is affectionately known—the graphic impulse was a vital part of his creativity from the very beginning. Even with his 1960 invention, Boxing Painting, his graphism manifested itself through his action. However, he had to learn to control his overflowing energy, which is a double-edged sword. In 1963, American Pop Art provided him with an opportunity to hone his skills. To create his whimsical yet ironical Imitation Art series, he deployed a set of mechanical tools and techniques (such as stenciling), the use of which he would further refine with the next Oiran series. Intrigued by Japan’s premodern popular culture, the ukiyo-e woodblock print, the Oiran (high-class geisha) became his Marilyn, an iconic representation of female archetype. When Ushio moved to New York in 1969, thanks to The JDR 3rd Fund, among the first works he created in his new home was a gigantic 8-by-8-foot Oiran. A scavenger extraordinaire, he glued together scrap strips of canvas given to him by an artist friend to make a masterpiece. He recently recreated a slightly smaller 7-by-7-foot version for this exhibition which serves as a mini retrospective for his New York works.

Immersing himself in American culture, he soon identified a new iconography and a new material: the Motorcycle Sculpture series made of abandoned cardboard boxes and tubes he found in the Canal Street area where he then lived. In the 1970s and 1980s, as his graphic imagination was unleashed in his paintings and drawings, he began to freely and incongruously combine motifs of American popular culture and everyday life (including “Wild Turkey” or other liquor bottles and yellow cabs) and the themes of Japanese traditional and contemporary culture (such as Jirochō, a righteous yakuza don, and the manga Fist of the North Star). The mixing in a mode that I call “Yankee Japonica” was soon extended to his Motorcycles, which then became literally vehicles to carry his imagination, mounted by a host of characters, from Pokemon to Spider-Man, from Oiran to Asura (a Buddhist guardian demon with three faces and six arms). Now an octogenarian, Ushio has entered his “late-age style.” (I owe this observation to Hiroko Ikegami.) One might imagine a looser Titian or a melting Monet, but Ushio pushes to the extreme his youthful motto, “Be speedy, beautiful, and rhythmical,” to frenetically give physical form to everything and anything that catches his fancy. One of his latest efforts, on display, derives from his Oscar experience as a protagonist of Cutie and the Boxer.

For more information about the event, please visit:
http://hpgrpgalleryny.com