exhibition

Bridge

Masakatsu Kondo

13.Oct.07 - 18.Nov.07
Wed-Sun 12-6pm

David Risley Gallery
45 Vyner St
London E2 9DQ
020 8980 2202
info@davidrisleygallery.com
www.davidrisleygallery.com
Tube Bethnal Green; BR Cambridge Heath, Hackney / Bethnal Green

David Risley Gallery are delighted to present new work by Masakatsu Kondo.

In his first solo exhibition in the UK since 2003, Kondo will show a series of paintings that take the motif of the bridge as their focus, both figuratively and metaphorically.

Bridges are liminal spots. Neither land, air or water, they signify the possibility of crossing over or transition. As such, the bridge can conjure both anxiety and longing. In Kondo’s work, the viewer is offered a similar chance to cross into another place or mode of being. Photorealist landscapes are precisely rendered in exquisite, shocking colour. Subtler and more ambiguous than his earlier work, these new paintings are also characterised by the introduction of living creatures, animals and birds, each bringing their own complex yearnings to bear on the atmosphere of the painting.

The realms these animals inhabit are mythical, drawing on Kondo’s roots and previous work on traditional Japanese landscapes as well his assimilation of European influences. The landscapes are accessibly alien as Kondo subverts the tradition of the direct reproduction of nature by painting at one remove, as it were. The large canvasses invite one in with the possibility of travel to such stranger realms just as the birds in the pictures reveal a spark of longing to crossover those open vistas in front of them.

Kondo was born in Japan and has been based in London since 1989 when he started attending the Slade School of Art. Since graduating he has exhibited regularly in his adopted country, native Japan and Europe.