[Solo Exhibition] Daichi Igarashi “Unfinished Flower Garden,” gallery fu

Daichi Igarashi — The Unfinished Flower Garden (unfinished flower garden)

I visited the solo exhibition of Daichi Igarashi, a fourth-year student at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai). The venue is “gallery fu,” just steps from Ishikawacho Station in Yokohama.

I’ve seen Daichi Igarashi’s work from time to time, and this appears to be his first full-fledged solo show.
*His exhibition at Miura Jiro Gallery featured only a single work.

https://art-on.jp/2019/01/ni-o/

As its title “Unfinished Flower Garden” suggests, the show is composed of works with flowers as their motif.
While using flowers as a motif, the works explore a distinctly Japanese aesthetic sensibility — captured in words like wabi, sabi, and the “beauty of insufficiency.”

Highly skilled and technically gifted, he nonetheless doesn’t paint a perfect beauty to completion; instead he leaves blank space, appealing to the viewer. An aesthetic of subtraction.

The works layering oil paint over photographs he had taken were fascinating.
The photos were shot in Ginza and Roppongi, and placing flowers into the scenery brought the intriguing effect of utterly transforming the space.

I’d strongly associated this artist with figure painting, but his depiction of flowers was superb.
It made me want to see many more of his works.