Rakuko Naito

MARCH 5th - APRIL 30th, 2021

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Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present an online-exclusive exhibition by Japanese born and New York-based artist Rakuko Naito. This is her first solo exhibition with a Los Angeles gallery. The show will be live online March 5th through April 30th, with selected artwork available for viewing at the gallery.

Rakuko Naito was born in Tokyo and in the 1950s studied Nihonga painting at the prestigious Tokyo National University of Art. In 1958 she moved permanently to the US with her husband, Minimal painter Tadaaki Kuwayama, settling in New York where for more than 30 years she has worked exclusively with hand-made natural papers.

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Naito uses paper the way a painter manipulates oil paint. Her vision is always two dimensional, she says, and her breathtaking, painstakingly detailed work is conceived to hang on the wall much like a painting does. She is interested in she says, “the simple beauty of shapes, both shapes of nature and geometric forms” and strives above all else in her art for “appealing forms as well as the tactile qualities of the surface and the texture.” Color is intentionally, rigorously restricted to focus the viewer on the formal elements of her designs.

Her latest body of artwork made over the last 12 months in her New York studio deepens her love of natural and geometric forms, texture and surface qualities in art. Her paintings are aligned formally with Minimalism, but the processes, materials, inspiration are entirely different—even unique. She does not begin with a drawing or a sketch in mind but she prefers to allow an image, often found in nature, to imprint itself on her mind and then to recreate it from memory.

She begins work in the studio with a box like frame, usually a square, and decides what shape to place on top of it. She then chooses the paper—always Japanese, white or off-white, hand-made and 100% natural and archival, but she does not work with the usual, known traditions of Japanese paper art like Origami. She prefers to casually tear or cut up paper she uses. The design evolves as she goes, but she tries to keep close to the original idea in her head. She explains, “A line formed naturally is not the same as a line drawn by hand. I try to experiment and manipulate materials to create my own world.”

Every work has a different image, a different inspiration even if they superficially look the same. This is not art about repetition or Zen or meditation. Nor is it artwork with a message or didactic quality. “I’m not trying to tell people what they should think or should see,” she says “it’s up to them. I always try to find beauty in simplicity and so for me that is the hardest thing to do, to do something complicated that looks more straightforward. My concern is purely art and visual stimulation.”

Rakuko Naito has presented more than 25 solo exhibitions over the last half century and participated in more than 50 group shows in a dozen countries. Her work is held in numerous museum collections including The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Buenos Aires Argentina; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.