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Email PageGolden Fire
November 30, 2006- January 20, 2007
Reception: November 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Makoto Fujimura
Sara Tecchia Roma New York
529 W 20th St Makoto Fujimura Golden Fire |
To make gold rise. This was the challenge that Boston-born painter Makoto Fujimura set before himself. Gold being the most complicated of materials, simultaneously associated with wealth and spirituality, but also with purity, permanence and sovereignty. Its inherent weight lends gravity to Medieval manuscripts, authority to the king's crown, and lavishness to classic Japanese art. It has always been used in religious art, adding "the weight of divinity."
With this in mind, Fujimura has used the material as a metaphor for art itself, and allows the gold to become light, to rise to bring hope.
Completed over the course of five years, the centrepiece of the show-also entitled Golden Fire-is the culmination of his acclaimed Water Flames series. He spent 18 months layering the gold, five layers over the lower corners of the painting.
Fujimura uses the Medieval Japanese technique of Nihonga painting, whereby metals and ground minerals are applied directly to Kumohada paper, the largest, strongest paper in the world. There are no acrylics or oils here, but hand-ground pigments applied via an organic animal hide glue, nikawa.
"The materials I use," Fujimura explains, "are mostly derived from the medieval methods of Japan, they lend themselves to the subtle intersection between abstraction and representation hidden behind the four basic elements: Water, Earth, Air and Fire. Pulverized precious minerals, gifts from the earth, are layered with water onto Japanese mulberry and hemp fibers, creating a semi-permanent surface. The prismatic semi-opaque layers trap light, creating refraction of light for the eyes to delight in. Paper breathes, accommodating itself to the environment, and thus continues to mold itself to the surroundings, and that process is captured by the watermarks on the surface. The surface itself is an ecosystem of colors combining earth with air, and water with, in this new series, fire.
The exhibit also contains the recent video and installation, "Mercy Seat Portraits" created for this summer's The City of London Festival with Yoko Ono and others.
Makoto Fujimura was born in 1960 in Boston, MA. He graduated from Bucknell University in 1983, and received his MFA from Tokyo's National University of Fine Arts and Music, followed by an additional degree from the Japanese Painting Doctorate program, a first for an outsider to this prestigious six-year program. He is the youngest artist ever to have had artwork acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.
Fujimura assimilates American abstract expressionism with the traditional Japanese art of Nihonga, and makes it his own. He has enjoyed success both in the United States and Japan, and has become a voice of bi-cultural authority on the nature and cultural assessment of beauty, by both creating it and exploring its forms.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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