2014 Catalogue Archive

For his recent body of work, Shimon Minamikawa uses two photographs of the same woman from a vintage fashion magazine. Combined with a variety of painterly compositions, the awkward photos of the posed woman smiling back at us from the past interact with fields of paint, and take on any number of meanings. In Play, the two images mirror each other in placement and in the woman’s pose (as she faces herself), and a strange visual collision occurs with the anachronistic image floating on a minimal painterly ground. Minamikawa’s museum exhibitions include Out of Doubt: Roppongi Crossing, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Why not live for Art? II, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery; and Real Japanesque, The National Museum of Art, Osaka.