Ai Gallery and SPC Gallery
Closes in 16 days
Chihiro Ito, a painter and installation artist, turns exhibition spaces into larger-than-life, bizarrely distorted versions of themselves. Taking ordinary objects already present in a space, such as tables, chairs, pot plants or fire extinguishers, Ito draws them on the wall in black duct tape, magnifying them into room-sized schematics that float above the floor.
Since graduating from Musashino Art University in 2004, he has worked in a wide variety of spaces, including commercial galleries, art cafes and abandoned buildings, and in September last year, even bravely exhibited his works outdoors in a dingy, narrow alleyway in Shinjuku's Golden Gai area. Consisting of self-portraits and still-lives painted onto corrugated plastic, the images blended in seamlessly with the ramshackle structures on which they were hung.
Upcoming solo exhibitions of new work are being held simultaneously at the Ai Gallery in Kyobashi (opens May 15) and the SPC Gallery in Nihombashi (opens May 9), where he will cover the walls with huge black and white enlargements of plants and undergrowth. The aim, he says, is to make people think about the way in which we perceive nature, by reversing the norm so that it is no longer humans observing plants, but plants observing humans.
