Tokyo Gallery+BTAP (Tokyo) is pleased to announce the new work editions by Hiroyuki Matsuura. The exhibition will open on Thursday, July 27 and will run for two weeks.
Hiroyuki Matsuura was born in 1964 in Tokyo. His solo exhibition Super Acrylic Skin at Tokyo Gallery in 2005 marked his turn from designer to artist, and he has since expanded his art form to include painting, sculpture, and prints, presenting his works in Japan and abroad. In the 2017 exhibition Cool Japan: World Fascination in Focus held in the Netherlands at Museum Volkenkunde (Leiden) and Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), and in Belgium at Museum aan de Stroom (Antwerp), he presented Uki-uki (2012), a four-meter-high large-scale work that was used as the key visual of the exhibition. In 2020, he held a solo exhibition entitled SUPER ACRYLIC SKIN—Quiet World at Eslite Gallery in Taipei, attracting significant interest as a response to the quiet world of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The diverse characters that appear in Matsuura’s works, are captured in bold close-up compositions that fill the painting. They reside there with a suggestive expression, at times flattering, at times provocative, and at times casting a cold gaze at us. In today’s world where images are reproduced in massive quantities, characters inundate everyday life through the marketplace. For Matsuura, whose job was to create such characters who are consumed and forgotten day by day, they constituted a familiar presence despite being imaginary. With their “Super Acrylic Skin,” the characters appear in the paintings with an inner life that cannot be seen from the outside, asserting their existence that goes beyond mere empty anthropomorphic images.
In this exhibition, we will be showcasing his new figure, Windy Bunny 2022 (Edition 120), for the first time in Japan. "Windy Bunny 2022" is a new version that is developed based on his "Windy Bunny" created in 2007. With this new figure, a young child wearing a rabbit costume grows up after 16 years of time and appears before us once again. Additionally, we will be exhibiting 9 types of prints made out of silkscreen and giclee along with a new painting.
