A Japanese dublin-based artist Atsushi Kaga works with different medium like painting, drawing, sculpture and animation, but always with wry sense of humour. His style has been influenced by Japanese Popular culture, which he grew up with. His clumsy and intimate approach to materials blurs the context of life and art, the real and perceived. He describes his work as existing on, and incorporating the margins of worlds, at once arcane and everyday – posing “…mundane questions to which there are no particular answers”. In his project at Galeria Leme, he brings anonymous aspect of life to the forefront, examining his own footing within a world constantly askew.
For his first show in Brazil named Why can we keep going forward? Because we forget the problem of yesterday he created sculptures and paintings which are all melancholic and somehow humorous at the same time. Before he came to São Paulo he was intending to make some painting and sculpture using things available to him there in São Paulo, probably discarded materials. The artist would not bring anything there except melancholy of all kinds, particularly the one where things never stay the same. He would see what would happen when his melancholy meets Brazilian lively energy which he was hoping to encounter. In the end, Atsushi found some interesting feeling of the city and people to work with. He used discarded materials in the street for his sculpture, and painted transvestites outside of his studio. In this show he wanted to question the value placed on what we hold on to, give away and discard, and how that plays into who we become.
The artist arrived in São Paulo to have his residency at Galeria Leme on June 24 and will be there until July 23.
About the artist:
Atsushi Kaga (Tokyo, 1978), lives and works in Dublin, Ireland.
The artist studied art in Dublin at The National College for Art & Design, graduating in 2005, and is a recipient of number of awards, Visual Arts Bursary from Arts Council of Ireland in 2007 and 2009, and International Studio, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin in 2006. He is having a residency at Fountainhead in Miami from October 2009 and at Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) from January 2010 for six months. Atsushi has been showing internationally since his graduation in 2005.
Selected exhibitions: Why can we keep going forward? Because we forget the problem of yesterday, Galeria Leme, São Paulo, Brazil (2009); I want to give love to socially neglected parts of you, that is my mission, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland; Nicholas Krupp Gallery, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Bunny’s Darkness and Other Stories, Mother`s Tankstation, Dublin, Ireland; Visual Fictions, curated by Cliodhna Shaffrey, Fenton Gallery, Cork, Ireland (2007); Utopias, Eigse Carlow 2006, selected by Ann O’Sullivan, Carlow, Ireland (2006); A Moment in Time, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2005)