The Incredible Tale of the Innocent Old Lady and the
Heartless Young Girl:
Miwa Yanagi at the Hara Museum in Tokyo
Miwa
Yanagi, Gretel, 2004
Deutsche
Bank Collection, ©Miwa Yanagi
Last year, she attracted attention at the Deutsche
Guggenheim with her artificially aged "grandmothers" and the cool
hostesses of her series Elevator Girls: since then, the young
Japanese art photographer Miwa
Yanagi has embarked on a world career. Her works have already been
exhibited in Dusseldorf, Moscow, and Shanghai; now, Tokyo’s Hara
Museum is presenting Yanagi’s latest series of works in a solo show
titled The Incredible Tale of the Innocent Old Lady and the Heartless
Young Girl. At the center of the exhibition is the work Fairy Tales
, a photographic series that concentrates on stories of girls who
encounter old, wise, and sometimes eerie old women of the kind to be found
in Grimm’s Fairy
Tales or the contemporary short story Erendira by the
Colombian Gabriel García
Márquez.
Miwa
Yanagi, Erendira, 2004
Deutsche
Bank Collection, ©Miwa Yanagi
Yanagi’s oeuvre is based on her observations of
Japanese society. Women, outward appearances, and labels form the heart of
her works, which address uniforms and disguises, groups and allegiances –
as well as the liberation from them. For her 2004 series Fairy Tales
, Yanagi limited herself to classical black and white photography, in
contrast to her earlier, digitally manipulated photographs. As in her Grandmothers
series shown at the Deutsche Guggenheim, she once again implements special
effects and make-up to allow young women to slip into the roles of old
ladies. The fantastic dream scenarios and hermetic rooms she creates to
stage her dramas are anything but mere illustrations of traditional
stories and myths.
Miwa
Yanagi, Red Riding Hood, 2004
Deutsche
Bank Collection, ©Miwa Yanagi
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Cinderella,
Red Riding Hood, Gretel
, and Rapunzel –
each of them make an appearance, albeit under strange circumstances: Red
Riding Hood embraces her grandmother in the slit belly of the killed wolf,
while Gretel bites the wrinkly hand stretched out to her in the dark cage.
It becomes abundantly clear that behind their wrinkled masks, the young
women behave like cruel puppeteers visibly relishing their reversed role.
Here, the evil stepmothers and witches that torture young girls in
classical tales find rivals equal to their task. Thus, in Yanagi’s Sleeping
Beauty, the girl grabs her spindle and attacks an old woman sitting at
the spinning wheel. Subversively, Yanagi’s oppressive and surreal
scenarios probe layers of individual and collective consciousness. At the
same time, their fairy-tale female creatures also embody a paradox. That
is the moral of Yanagi’s modern tales – there is a young girl lurking in
every old woman, and an old woman in every young girl.
Miwa Yanagi
– Hara Museum, Tokyo
The Incredible Tale of the Innocent Old Lady
and the Heartless Young Girl
8/13/2005 – 11/6/2005
Minimalistically
reduced formal language:
Not Vital at the Kunstraum Salzburg
Not
Vital, Camel, 2003
Courtesy
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, Paris
New
drawings and sculptures by the Swiss artist Not
Vital can currently be seen at Deutsche Bank’s Kunstraum in Salzburg:
Vital, born 1948, is one of the most important sculptors worldwide; his
works have been shown in museums such as the Kunsthalle
Basel, the Museum of Modern Art ,
the Guggenheim
, or at the 2001 Venice Biennale.
Self-taught, Vital developed an oeuvre that is as marked by the archaic
formations of the Swiss mountains as the architecture of his new home, New
York, or the African desert city of Agadez, which the artist regularly
visits. An openness for a variety of cultures characterizes Vital’s art,
which combines European motifs with influences from other continents. The
resulting works, such as Camel on Skis (1993), come across as being
both ambivalent and surreal.
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1000 Tears, 2004, schwarzer Marmor, 4
Teile, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, Paris
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A Model for a Water Tower, 2004,
schwarzer Marmor, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Salzburg, Paris
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After his last one-person exhibition in Paris, the Thaddaeus
Ropac Gallery is showing a series of works at the Kunstraum Salzburg
that are typical for Vital’s minimalist, reduced formal language as well
as his approach to costly materials. In Camel (2003), the artist
addresses animal motifs. At the same time, the title of the fifteen
ceramic pieces refers to their contents: the mortal remains of a camel
that has dried out in the sun and has been sliced and incorporated into
the sculptures. On a subliminal level, the work refers to burial rites and
calls attention to Western civilization’s widespread aversion to death and
decay.
Vital’s work continually addresses the unknown and the
mysterious: thus, the artist finished off his archaic-looking column 1000
Tears, made in 2004, with the stains of 1,000 tears.
Not Vital
– Kunstraum Salzburg
Sculptures and Drawings
8/29 – 10/8/2005
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