MISAKO & ROSEN is pleased to announce our first presentation of a solo exhibition with artist Kaoru Arima.

Arima, born in 1969 in Aichi, Japan, has exhibited extensively within Japan and abroad; a selection of significant group exhibitions includes “How Latitudes Become Forms”, a traveling exhibition presented by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2003) and, subsequently, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaubengo Per L Arte, Turin, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico and Museo De Arte Contemporaneo De Monterrey, Mexico as well as the “54th Carnegie International”, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2004) and “The Age of Micropop: The New Generation of Japanese Artists”, Art Tower MIto, Mito (2007). in 2011, Arima participated in the group exhibition “Family Affair” at XYZ Collective as well as “Happy Mind” at MISAKO & ROSEN, both in Tokyo.

The present exhibition represents a shift in Arima’s practice; for MISAKO & ROSEN, Arima will present, within the context of an installation, for the first time, a body of painting. The artist continues to produce a diaristic series of drawings on newspaper – many of which include text – as well as more recent works on paper which focus more directly on the aesthetic of drawing and primarily take the form of portfolios of portraits executed in line, yet for this exhibition Arima’s concerns rest in the possibilities of a contemporary painterly practice. And in this medium, the artist is able to draw upon a strength of in-betweeness and abstraction to create works which somehow both perfectly and awkwardly balance representational and formal concerns. The paintings, while rooted in Arima’s response to daily-life in Tokyo post March 11, 2011, are equally experiments in coloration and explorations of the space both within and outside the canvas. As in his works on paper, Arima has managed to foreground multiple concerns without thematizing any of them and has created a body of work advanced in its concerns.