YUKO MURATA: From Morning & FUMITO URABE: A Passage of Ancient Red Rice

James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is pleased to present two solo exhibitions by two of Japan's most widely admired and dynamic young artists, Yuko Murata and Fumito Urabe. Opening on Saturday, January 11th, 2014 with a special reception for the artists from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., the exhibitions continue through March 2nd.

For her second exhibition at the gallery, from morning, Yuko Murata's paintings continue the artist's distinctive signature motifs of animals and landscapes. On view will be recent paintings of birds, barren, leafless trees, squirrels and other creatures, meek and mild, who rule over the deceptive powers of innocence. Much of Murata's source material for her paintings come from found photographs, postcards, wildlife guidebooks or encyclopedias. Though relatively modest in scale, her works have considerable material presence by way of
nuanced, layered brushwork and often playful compositions. In A Short Trip a tree-dwelling possum traverses the painting's edges, like a tightrope walker on a single arching branch. In the work Mint, more in Murata's 'portrait style' of animal imagery, a chipmunk poses in profile with its lush brown and white stripes emphasizing both curvature and break between an austere gray and brown background. These are a few notable examples of the subtle compositional shifts in Murata's new works. In her recent landscape paintings such as Sweet Home, the viewer is situated inside the trunk of a tree, looking upward through a hole to the sky toward distant bare treetops. In this work, as in several others, (Mirror, In Water, Here and There), all rational perspective is flattened, leveled and effortlessly displaced, creating a feeling of disorientation.

Yuko Murata (b. 1973, Kanagawa, Japan) has been the subject of many prominent solo exhibitions since 2000. Her works were featured in the 2006 Taipei Biennial “Dirty Yoga” curated by Dan Cameron at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. She has had solo exhibitions in New York at Casey Kaplan Gallery (2009) as well as in Houston, Texas at Inman Gallery, and Alberto Peola, Turin, in 2009. Her works are in distinguished private and public collections including Daiwa Radiator Factory, Hiroshima; Takahashi Collection, Tokyo; The Obayashi Collection, Tokyo; The Sander Collection, Damstadt; Poligrapha, Barcelona, among numerous private collections in the United States and Europe. She lives and works in Tokyo.