VENUES

Since its founding in 1998, TARO NASU has represented various conceptual artists such as Futo Akiyoshi, Koichi Enomoto, Simon Fujiwara, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Maiko Haruki, Takashi Homma, Pierre Huyghe, Taiji Matsue, Mika Tajima, Michiko Tsuda, and Lawrence Weiner. TARO NASU works with a range of international art museums and public agencies to organize exhibitions and events.

“Purple Green Orange” is Futo Akiyoshi’s first exhibition at TARO NASU in three years. The show will feature a new painting from his “naked relations” series, which he has been working on regularly since 2013. The painting will be accompanied by a three-dimensional collection of paint tubes, literally distilled from the concept of painting, inviting the viewer to consider the concept of creating a painted artwork and the processes involved.

The three colors after which the exhibition is named—purple, green, and orange—are compounds made from the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. With the “naked relations” series, Akiyoshi applies pigments directly to a transparent acrylic board, asking the viewer to confront the processes by which compound colors are generated from primary colors, as well as how they react to each other and resonate time and again, eventually coming together to form a single cohesive canvas. The successive layers of applied paint mirror the very idea of the successive layers of time spent applying it.

Additionally, the texture of the wall can be seen through the artwork and forms an integral part of the overall experience of engaging with the work. It also has the effect of reducing the imaginary three-dimensional space within the work to the material presence of the layers of paint. The harmony and discordance created by layers of color, seesawing between the material and nonmaterial, celebrates both freshness and tension, like an illusion where art is increasingly portrayed as an event in and of itself.