MOMOPOLY
Katsumi Hayakawa / Kotori Kawashima / Yosuke Kobashi / Tomoko Konoike / Hiroko Masuko / Naomi Okubo / Tokuro Sakamoto
March 16 (Sat) - March 24 (Sun), 2024
Open：11:00 - 19:00 / Free administration
Spiral garden (1st floor)
Organized by GALLERY MoMo
Venue cooperation: Wacoal Art Center Co.
Since its opening in Roppongi in 2003, GALLERY MoMo has sought its own identity by building relationships with artists through various solo exhibitions and events.
This exhibition, titled "MOMOPOLY," will present works that express the relationship between the artist and the gallery, while seriously enjoying "making" in a variety of expressions. Without setting a difficult theme, we aim to present an exhibition that gives new perspectives and inspiration to the artworks by bringing together our artists while making the most of the Spiral's unique space.
Naomi Okubo
Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1985, Okubo received her MFA from Musashino Art University in 2011. While delicately and vividly depicting relationships with others and the theme of "home," she delves into and questions the issues of contemporary society. Newly using materials such as sewing and glass, she attempts to express the depth and subtlety of the issues.
Kotori Kawashima
Born in Tokyo in 1980. After graduating from Waseda University, Kawashima studied under Genki Numata. While taking time to focus on a specific person as his subject, Kawashima creates works that carefully cut out the scenery and other elements around the person. The works reflect the relationship with the subject and solidify Kawashima's worldview while incorporating changes and narratives that can only be found in the "now".
Tomoko Konoike
Born in Akita, Japan in 1960, and graduated from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Department of Painting, majoring in Japanese Painting. received the Minister of Education Award for Art in 2017 and the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2023. After working in toy and furniture design, since 1997 she has been showing her works in total installations, using various media such as painting, sculpture, performance, animation, and handicrafts. Konoike has had interdisciplinary sessions with various fields and continues to reexamine the fundamental questions of art. She is going to have a solo exhibition at the Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori in July 2024.
Yosuke Kobashi
Born in Nara Prefecture in 1980, Kobashi graduated from Osaka University of Arts in 2003. In addition to his self-portrait series, which he has continued since his early days, Kobashi has expanded his motifs to include familiar people, plants, and scenery, intentionally eliminating ideology, and while his work may seem merely optimistic, there are no boundaries. The works are created with a sense of the symbolic elements of our diverse society and times.
Tokuro Sakamoto
Born in Yamanashi Prefecture in 1975, Sakamoto graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in 1999 with a degree in Japanese painting. Although Sakamoto majored in Japanese painting at the university, Sakamoto has developed his own unique world of painting by chosing acrylic paint as a more suitable medium for painting contemporary Japanese motifs rather than highly textured iwa-enogu (rock paint) on hemp paper. By looking at natural landscapes and man-made structures he sees in his daily life with an equivalent eye, Sakamoto finds beauty in the rhythms, repetitions, overlaps, and hollows that are repeated there, extracts the necessary elements, and reconstructs them on a simple canvas.
Katsumi Hayakawa
Born in Tochigi, Japan in 1970, Hayakawa graduated from Nihon University, Department of Art in 1992 and moved to the U.S., where he completed his studies at the School of Visual Arts in 1998. Hayakawa has been creating urban images in paintings composed of lines, surfaces, dots, and semi-3-dimensional works on paper. He also uses mirrored plates to deepen his thinking about "what you see” and "what you can see" and expand his work's scope to consider more fundamental questions such as the perception and sensation of sight, consciousness, and the movement of the mind.
Hiroko Masuko
Born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1982, Masuko completed her graduate studies at Miyagi University of Education in 2008. The "Bonsai" series, which she has been working on since her early career, has been created from the perspective of the collaboration between nature and human beings, using a pen to nurture the ideal form she imagines. After that, Masuko has been moving from place to place in the Tohoku region, using what she has cultivated there as inspiration for her works. The current series, “KAWANOUTSUWA” is an accumulation of many daily drawings.
