A person in a red sweater

2015 - Painting (Painting)

Kaoru Arima

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Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic painting Ticket (also 2015), Person in Red Sweater could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art. His figurative work, however, suggests a deeper sense of anxiety and discomfort, and his subjects seem projected out of a Surrealist nightmare of melting bodies. Person in Read Sweater is ultimately a work about fluctuation and an exemplary model of how painting (at its most expressive) can visualize complex psychic states of being.

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Kaoru Arima experiments with painting in order to discover new expressive forms. His free use of color and shape references Expressionism and Surrealism, and his figurative work utilizes fluctuating forms to suggest the inherent tension between outward appearance and internal conflict. At the same time, his style exhibits an earnest spontaneity that generates an almost gleeful “sense of time and play,” as noted in a 2015 statement from Arima’s Tokyo-based galley Misako & Rosen. In 2003, his work was shown at the Walker Arts Center as part of a group show “How Latitudes Become Forms.” His work has also been exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaubengo Per L Arte, Turin, the Museo De Arte Contemporaneo De Monterrey, Mexico, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

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Colors:

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• expressionism.n.01
• portrayal.n.01
• mystery.n.01
• surrealist.n.01
• nightmare.n.01
• psychological.s.01