Yutaka Kikutake Gallery is pleased to present group exhibition “GOLD” featuring three artists Ian Grose, Maia Cruz Palileo and Massinissa Selmani. The shiny gleam of gold from the bottom of a riverbed first caught our eye some 6,000 years ago. The precious metal has fascinated people ever since, playing a role in religion, art, government, chemistry, and other manifestations of human creativity. This exhibition uses art to explore something that captivates us like gold, approaching the topic not from the cultural and historical background, but from a different perspective altogether.
Ian Grose was born in Johannesburg in 1985 and lives and works in Cape Town. Grose is interested in the philosophy of painting, particularly the ways in which the world, viewer and picture come together to propose or define meaning for each other. He employs the subject matter in his paintings as pretexts, to research how the paintings function as objects of experience, and how they might act as metaphors for the experience of seeing and representing the world. One of the guiding principles for him is the idea, or ideas, of materialism, especially in regard to representation. Being faced with both an image of something from the world, and the image’s physical existence as an object – the painting – Ian seeks to navigate the contradictions and relationships between these realities.
A multi-disciplinary artist, Maia Cruz Palileo was born in 1979 and currently based in Brooklyn. Migration and the permeable concept of home are constant themes in her paintings, installations, sculptures, and drawings. Influenced by the oral history of her family’s arrival in United States from the Philippines, as well as the history between the two countries, Maia infuses these narratives using both memory and imagination. When stories and memories are subjected to time and constant retelling, the narratives become questionable, bordering the line between fact and fiction, while remaining cloaked in the convincingly familiar.
Massinissa Selmani was born in 1980 in Algiers, Algeria. Lives and works in France and Algeria. He tries all kinds of experiments that drawing allows. It is characterized by an extreme simplicity – often presenting montages of images and drawings, or short animations in which he mingles humor, irony, and sometimes a sense of revolt. Massinissa’s images reveal the ambiguities of the signs and push their juxtapositions until absurdity. The subjects of his works are often sourced from political news, social news and press clippings. The images that they show are the results of a selection process, treatment and cropping inspired by the archive and documentary codes. Sometimes they create a mise en scene or a narrative that opens up various experimentation fields.
You sometimes come across art that arouses warm, somehow nostalgic feelings, even if the surroundings are unusual. Your heart resonates, drawing you into the world you have discovered, much as if you were enchanted by sounds that elate you. Art occasionally provides exciting moments like this. Gold is forged by the stars, but perhaps humans also have the potential to produce something that captivates us in a similar manner.