Colours and Forms - Group Exhibition

Opening reception on Friday, February 3, 2015, 3-6pm. Artists Taiga Chiba and Junichiro Iwase will be in attendance.

Art Beatus (Vancouver) Consultancy Ltd is pleased to present Colours and Forms, our group exhibition featuring a special selection of works by a few of our gallery artists. For this exhibition, we are featuring works that explore different utilization and expression of colour and form. The monotype prints by Taiga Chiba are primordial and dreamy, reminiscent of symbolist art, while Junichiro Iwase’s digital photographs of egg shells set against a television screen are a curious mixture of surrealism and pop art. The acrylic paintings by Mimi Chen Ting feature abstracted forms and interplay of colours whereas the mixed media paintings by Tomoko Taniguchi are more of an exuberant celebration via abstract expressionism. Takehiro Yoshimitsu’s ostensibly minimalist work is, upon closer inspection, a multiple-layered oil and stripper on canvas painting whose cut-out surface layer reveals both a form and a contrasting colour underneath.

About the Artists and the Works

Born in Shizuoka, Japan in 1950, Taiga Chiba earned a Bachelor of Arts from Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Japan in 1974 and, after he immigrated to Canada in 1981, he completed a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal in 1986. What is characteristic of the artist and his work is his strong sense of irrepressible wonder for the world around him. Primordial and prehistoric, Chiba’s work is often a mixture of biological study with the imaginary. “My experiences as an artist-in-residence have led me to understand that I am strongly impacted by people and circumstances as if I am a biologist, watching myself in a glass beaker, putting in different water, air scents, adding colour, heat or ice and shaking it up a bit to see what the result will be.”

Junichiro Iwase was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1971 and at seven months old, his family moved to Canada where his is now a current resident of Richmond, BC. He studied fine art at Vancouver Community College and Johnson Sculpture Atelier in New Jersey. Iwase has worked in a variety of media including drawing, painting, printmaking and sculpture but as a self-taught photographer, he has been photographing his paintings and sculptures for more than 20 years. Iwase began incorporating the use of egg shells in his work when he started donating eggs to soup kitchens in Vancouver after which he would collect and clean the discarded shells. The Electric Flower series of digital photographic prints on dibond were taken during his residency in Beijing in the summer of 2013.

Currently based in New Mexico and California, Mimi Chen Ting was born in 1946 in Shanghai, China and moved to Hong Kong as a young child with her family. She relocated to California to pursue her studies and completed a Bachelor’s degree in Art from San Jose University in 1969 and a Master of Art from California State University in 1976. Ting has been exhibiting her work for over 40 years and her work is part of numerous private, public and corporate collections. Her abstract acrylic paintings have a blithe, childlike sense of play. According to Ting, “…it excites me when dynamic interactions between colours and forms come to life.

Tomoko Taniguchi was born in 1940 in what is present day North Korea and moved to Hiroshima, Japan after the Second World War where she spent her childhood amidst the horror and aftermath of the atomic bomb. In 1960, she studied design from Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, Japan where she currently resides. Despite her difficult early life, she is driven to create and breathe life and beauty into her work. “In my creative process, the reality of the moment or the fact of being alive and present emerges from my psyche and transforms into shapes, colours, [and] inspiration.”

In 1978, Takehiro Yoshimitsu was born in Kanagawa, Japan and in 2002 he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Musashino Art University in Tokyo. With regards to his work, Yoshimitsu declares, “I am interested in hidden possibilities.” Yoshimitsu’s paintings have been described as having a “digging out” style in which different layers of paint have been applied to the canvas and then the uppermost layer has been removed to reveal an underlying layer of contrasting colour beneath the surface layer. Although seemingly minimalist, Yoshimitsu’s work often deals with the existential search for meaning and substance amidst the emptiness and alienation of modern life.

For more information, please visit our website at www.artbeatus.com or call the gallery at 1 (604) 688-2633.