Support: galerie 16
Tokyo Gallery+BTAP is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Etsutomu Kashihara starting Saturday, July 6.
Etsutomu Kashihara was born in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture in 1941 and graduated from the Department of Painting at Tama Art University in 1965. He studied under Yoshishige Saito and participated in exhibitions such as Tricks and Vision (Stolen Eyes) (Tokyo Gallery and Muramatsu Gallery, Tokyo, 1968), curated by Yusuke Nakahara and Junzo Ishiko, and the São Paulo Biennale in 1973. His representative works include the Silencer series (1967-68), which deals with the problem of perspective, What is Mr. X? (1968-69), a collaborative work with Hiroo Koizumi and Kinzo Maekawa, and My Methods Inspired by Marilyn (1973), which features portraits of Marilyn Monroe as a motif.
Kashihara's activities span a wide range, including writing exhibition reviews and producing picture books. Notable solo exhibitions include The Deconstruction of the "I": An Experiment by Kashihara Etsutomu (The National Museum of Art, Osaka, 2012). His works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Takamatsu Art Museum.
From early in his university years, Kashihara became interested in perspective, creating works with a figurative tendency that he called "reversed perspective" (1961-62). In these works, he incorporated the parallel and vertical perspectives found in Japanese and Oriental art, instead of the Western perspective, exploring the sense of depth that is unique to painting. He went on to limit his motif to boxes to investigate the theme of perspective further, producing the Silent Box and To Horizon series (1963-65). Later, in the Silencer series (1968), he reexamined visual perception through the effect of making a flat surface appear three-dimensional using perspective. The Tricks and Vision (Stolen Eyes) exhibition, where the Silencer series was displayed, was an event that symbolized the era's interest in "seeing" and the illusions that are inherent to it.
This exhibition will display representative works from the Silent Box, To Horizon, and Silencer series, providing a comprehensive overview of Kashihara's interests in the 1960s. We sincerely look forward to your visit.
