[Exhibition] "HOLBEIN ART FAIR 2021": A Showcase Discovering the Next Generation of Talent in the Art World

Aug 1, 2024 プラスアート編集部

"HOLBEIN ART FAIR 2021" - A Curated Exhibition Discovering the Next Generation of Talent in the Art World

PLUS ART Inc. (head office: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; Representative: Taku Nitta), which supports the creators of contemporary art, is pleased to announce that, together with HOLBEIN Co., Ltd. - a world-renowned art-materials maker with over 120 years of history (head office: Chuo-ku, Osaka; Representative: Yoshio Kawami) - it will once again hold the "HOLBEIN ART FAIR 2022" at "+ART GALLERY" on the 14th floor of Shibuya Scramble Square from Monday, August 15, 2022. The concept of this exhibition is "Possibility of painting."

■ The Vision Behind "HOLBEIN ART FAIR 2021"

Founded in 1900 as Yoshimura Minekichi Shoten, Holbein began with the wholesale and retail of stationery. Beyond sourcing Western painting materials and paints from around the world, it also took up in-house manufacturing, growing alongside the very beginnings of Japan's art industry.

With the development of the entire art world in mind, Holbein launched the "Holbein Scholarship" in 1986 to discover and support the next generation of talent. By providing artists with the diverse drawing materials and tools it handles, it has supported the work of more than 1,200 artists to date.

"HOLBEIN ART FAIR 2021" is Holbein's first-ever art fair - an occasion for scholarship recipients with the potential to lead the next generation of the Japanese art scene to gather, exhibit, and sell their work. We hope to elevate the "Holbein" brand, cultivated over more than 120 years, into a force that helps build artists' recognition and careers.

■ Overview of "HOLBEIN ART FAIR 2021"

A total of 21 artists take part in this exhibition, showing more than 100 works over four weeks. Every work on display is available for purchase, and +ART GALLERY staff will be on hand to guide you through them. As the "Holbein Scholarship" - which Holbein runs to support the work of artists in Japan in the hope of advancing the art world - reaches its 35th edition, this exhibition, featuring not only past scholarship recipients but also up-and-coming artists, is a must-see every week.

We also plan to set up a space where you can try out and experience HOLBEIN Co., Ltd.'s products, as well as opportunities to speak directly with Holbein staff.
Works can be purchased both on site and through the online store. If you would like details or guidance on a work, please contact us via the online store and we will be happy to assist.

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Works for sale will go live on the online store from 9:00 on August 23.

*Works are released on the first day of each session.

Online Store: https://pls-art-shop.com/

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1st Week｜2022年8月15日(月)〜2022年8月21日(日)
初英佳 / 濱口綾乃 / 福田紗也佳 / 興梠優護 / 井上光太郎

2nd Week｜2022年8月22日(月)〜2022年8月28日(日)
田岡智美 / 香月恵介 / 森島里香 / 古川あいか / 松本菜々

3rd Week｜2022年8月29日(月)〜2022年9月4日(日)
福本健一郎 / 深田桃子 / 渡部未乃 / 須貝旭 / 福田絵理

4th Week｜2022年9月5日(月)〜2022年9月11日(日)
SAKAMOTO ENTERTAINMENT / 大塚孝太郎 / 菊地虹 / 鈴木初音 / 安田悠|Yu Yasuda / 榊貴美
*Please check each artist's social media for their attendance dates.

- Dates: Monday, August 15 - Sunday, September 11, 2022, hours 10:00 - 21:00

*Hours may change due to COVID-19. Please check the official website for the latest information.

- Admission: Free

- Address: Shibuya Scramble Square, Shops & Restaurants 14F (150-0002, 2-24-12 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo)

- Access: About 30 seconds to 1 minute from JR Shibuya Station (Yamanote / Shonan-Shinjuku Lines), Tokyo Metro Shibuya Station (Fukutoshin / Hanzomon / Ginza Lines), and Tokyu Shibuya Station (Toyoko / Den-en-toshi Lines).

- Organized & Curated by: HOLBEIN Co., Ltd. and PLUS ART Inc.

- In cooperation with: Re-Creation Inc.

- Venue | +ART GALLERY

■ About Purchasing Works

Works are available for purchase, and are also sold online during the period!

＋ART Online Store：https://pls-art-shop.com/

The art materials shown at the venue can also be purchased from the Holbein online store.

Holbein Online Store: https://holbein-shop.com/

■ Artists & Works

*Please note that the comments below are not official statements from the artists but the organizer's own remarks, and contain a good deal of subjective opinion.

1st Week｜2022年8月15日(月)〜2022年8月21日(日)

▷初英佳 / 濱口綾乃 / 福田紗也佳 / 興梠優護 / 井上光太郎

Representative works by Week 1 participants

Week 1 features Holbein Scholarship recipients Hatsue Hatsu (31st), Ayano Hamaguchi (34th), Sayaka Fukuda (28th), Yugo Korogi (24th), and Kotaro Inoue (29th).

Hatsue Hatsu: She captures, with great freshness, the exhilaration of the moment the brush lands as she faces the canvas, letting the pleasant (the beautiful) and the unpleasant (the ugly) coexist without conflict, thereby expressing an attitude that embraces all manner of contradictions. The powerful, color-rich expression is the highlight.

Ayano Hamaguchi: Saying she "wants to paint works with an imbalance unique to painting," she takes plants as her motif yet does not paint botanical pictures. She introduces distortion into the pictorial space and renders even the invisible on the canvas, making her work endlessly engaging to look at.

Sayaka Fukuda: From the scenery of the places she visits, she finds a sense of mogari (a funerary rite of mourning) and creates two-dimensional works. The stories she has seen and felt with her own eyes are expressed across time and space, making her works a delight to decipher.

Yugo Korogi: Centering on the human body as a motif, he focuses on the ambiguous, ever-shifting qualities of light, color, and vision to explore the expanding possibilities of the pictorial. He has also handled the cover visual for Kazuya Yoshii's "Mirai no Uta." His various series rendered in signs and symbols are also a must-see.

Kotaro Inoue: Saying "I want to lead the viewer into a measure of that darkness," he uses motifs such as people, houses, and trees to turn his gaze toward the "darkness" beyond the physically visible, expressing not a darkness that merely inspires awe but one that draws close to human solitude. Emotions found within loneliness - stillness, restlessness - come through in his work.

2nd Week｜2022年8月22日(月)〜2022年8月28日(日)

▷田岡智美 / 香月恵介 / 森島里香 / 古川あいか / 松本菜々

Representative works by Week 2 participants

*Aika Furukawa's works were photographed by Yasuyuki Deguchi.

Week 2 features Holbein Scholarship recipients Tomomi Taoka (33rd), Keisuke Katsuki (32nd), Rika Morishima (32nd), Aika Furukawa (26th), and Nana Matsumoto (24th).

Tomomi Taoka: Unbound by formats such as two- or three-dimensional, analog or digital, she builds her works by combining and coordinating complex information, materials, and parts one by one. This free style is distinctive, and as her approach keeps renewing itself, she delivers a welcome sense of "betrayal" of expectations.

Keisuke Katsuki: He develops two-dimensional works centered on "pixel painting," reproducing images shown on a monitor through their display structure - that is, using only red, green, and blue (pixels). He chiefly takes up paintings by Monet and Turner, summoning the works of celebrated painters of light onto the monitor (a glowing image), a product of modern optical technology, and then, by painting that image, reconsidering modern vision and light - a distinctive form of pictorial expression.

Rika Morishima: She works by making collages from magazine clippings and online images, photographing them, and then painting from those photographs. She develops vivid works that let you enjoy both her improvisational, intuition-driven collage and her painting, which layers boldness with delicacy.

Aika Furukawa: After a residency in Germany supported by the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Pola Art Foundation, she now works internationally across Tokyo, Leipzig, and Brussels. Her main motif is the "creases of cloth" - in stripped-back duvets and pillows - cut from a slice of real everyday life. She combines the "creases" that constantly and naturally arise all around us. Her overwhelming draftsmanship, which sublimates creases into art, and her expressive power, acclaimed at home and abroad, are not to be missed.

Nana Matsumoto: Working mainly with the two-dimensional, paint, objects, narrative, imagery, and space, she draws you into a "2.5-dimensional" sensation. She reconstructs the causal - or irrational - relationships between image and thing alongside the problems of painting itself, and the messages felt from her works and creative intent are also a pleasure to take in.

3rd Week｜2022年8月29日(月)〜2022年9月4日(日)

▷ 深田桃子 / 渡部未乃 / 須貝旭 / 福田絵理 / 福本健一郎

Representative works by Week 3 participants

Week 3 features Holbein Scholarship recipients Momoko Fukada (34th), Mino Watanabe (34th), Akira Sugai (30th), Eri Fukuda (32nd), and Kenichiro Fukumoto (32nd).

Momoko Fukada: Centering on painting, she depicts modest relationships, the free body, the boundary between self and other, and the ambiguity of contact. We invite you to take in her works, which lend emotion to a stylish expression through shapes and bold lines.

Mino Watanabe: In recent years she has been energetically active, holding solo exhibitions and creating murals at Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi. By rendering vivid nature - plants, the sea - in straight lines, she paints pictures that exist between polar relationships such as natural and artificial, organic and inorganic, figurative and abstract. The expression of vibrant plants and the artificial straight lines give a sense of freshness.

Akira Sugai: On the theme of "aging," his works change in appearance as time passes. As silver leaf rusts, oil yellows, and cyanotype fades over time, the surface that once shone silver gradually changes color, so it is impossible to predict exactly what the work will look like months, years, or even decades later. These are works that let you forever enjoy not time sealed and stopped within the painting, but the "past yet to come," the "future already passed," or the hazy, ungraspable "here and now."

Eri Fukuda: She depicts unreal, invisible worlds in two-dimensional works. By "giving visible, perceptible form" to the unseen human heart, the spirit or a god-like presence, and to steam and air, she attempts to perceive this world more deeply. The blurred presences within the darkness, expressed in oil paint, feel somehow endearing.

Kenichiro Fukumoto: Drawing inspiration from the forms and colors of natural-history encyclopedias from across time and place, the tapestries of various peoples, microorganisms of soil and sea, and the houseplants around him, he creates paintings and sculptures while reflecting on the relationship between nature and humanity's creations stretching back to ancient times. In last year's exhibition, too, he treated a single-flower vase and an antique botanical encyclopedia as media for his paintings - work that is both unique and rich in its creative backstory.

4th Week｜2022年9月5日(月)〜2022年9月11日(日)

▷SAKAMOTO ENTERTAINMENT / 大塚孝太郎 / 菊地虹 / 鈴木初音 / 安田悠|Yu Yasuda / 榊貴美

Representative works by Week 4 participants

Week 4 features Holbein Scholarship recipients Yu Yasuda (22nd) and Kimi Sakaki (23rd). In addition, with the wish to "bring forth the next generation of artists," the final week also welcomes acclaimed artists beyond the scholarship recipients: SAKAMOTO ENTERTAINMENT, Kotaro Otsuka, Niji Kikuchi, and Hatsune Suzuki.

SAKAMOTO ENTERTAINMENT: She continually researches materials and sublimates them into her work. She briefly drew media attention when the virtual human "imma" wore an orange dress woven from rubber bands that she had made for her graduation project. Much of her work makes the most of the qualities of materials, and her use of them never ceases to amaze. This time she presents shaped-canvas works modeled on tangerine peel; her signature primary-orange works draw you into her entertainment-driven world.

Kotaro Otsuka: He paints "darkness" with black as his keynote. In his words, he finds a certain comfort in the "unfocused space" one senses while in the dark. His color work makes for a lovely "calming darkness," so much so that you may even wish to be drawn into the painting. The works themselves have a style that tightens up a space, making them a fine match for white walls.

Niji Kikuchi: Pasting in paper and cork, he mainly creates abstract and semi-abstract paintings with vivid color. He weaves together lines and forms drawn unintentionally and reactively into works, and what emerges belongs to that work alone - this is his hallmark. The overall impression is one of warmth and energy, and the artist's own ever-playful nature can be glimpsed in the work. Recently he drew attention when chosen to provide the cover art for a novel written by Daiki Kanechika of the comedy duo EXIT.

Hatsune Suzuki: Suzuki actually practices farming, examining how people and plants act upon one another, and through the creative act of "painting" with the materials gained in that process (soil and lime), she seeks to grasp the relationship between nature and humanity from a maker's perspective. Her works are made using sgraffito, an applied technique of fresco, and resemble murals. Working with lime, within the limited time before it bonds with carbon dioxide in the air and hardens, she creates with improvisational touches - yet, though they enclose a world in which all life connects and influences one another, the works are so delicate that they hardly seem improvised.

Yu Yasuda: An artist active at home and abroad, characterized by a fluid world and palette that evokes the flow of time and space and of landscape. In trying to capture, within the pictorial space, the way that forms and thoughts diversify and keep changing, he is mindful of how much explanatory detail to strip away and where to place the boundary lines. His blended use of color, with its blurred boundaries, draws the viewer in, and his works - ones you could go on looking at forever - reveal the maturity of his technique and framing.

Kimi Sakaki: She paints the presence (icon) of the "child," together with various things, as a vessel of expression and a mirror-like device. Her colors and works are recognizable as hers at a glance, and the colorful palette appeals to the senses as if hiding all kinds of pure, innocent emotion. She has taken part in many exhibitions in Japan and abroad, and beyond exhibitions she has formed the creative unit S+N laboratory, broadening her activity into other fields as well.

■ What Is the "Holbein Scholarship"?

Now accepting applications for the 35th Holbein Scholarship!

The "Holbein Scholarship" is a scholarship program that supports young artists.

The Holbein Scholarship program was established as a CSR initiative to support artists working in Japan, in the hope of creating outstanding works of art and advancing the art world. Regardless of the form of the work, the program supports artists who need color materials (oils, acrylics, and more) by providing the diverse materials and tools that Holbein handles. With the mission of building a closer relationship between recipients and the company, we incorporate their opinions and ideas into the development of new products, offer venues for them to present their work at our events and online projects, and invite them to take part in the scholarship in a more proactive, mutually equal relationship.

Since beginning in 1986 as the first Holbein Acryla Scholarship, the program has recognized more than 1,000 scholarship recipients in total. In 2003 it received the "Mécénat Award (New Generation Support Award)," given to companies and organizations that have greatly contributed to the promotion and development of art and culture. The Holbein Group will continue to redouble its efforts and advance activities that contribute, through its corporate work, to the development and promotion of art and culture.

Applications for the 35th Holbein Scholarship are now open, with a deadline of the end of August 2022.

Application deadline: Wednesday, August 31, 2022 (postmark valid)

[See the URL below for details on the 35th Holbein Scholarship!]

https://www.holbein.co.jp/scholarship/

【主催】

HOLBEIN Co., Ltd. (Organizer)

PLUS ART Inc. (Organizer)

[In cooperation with]

Re-Creation Inc. (In cooperation with)

■ Press & Inquiries

[Press inquiries regarding this matter]

+ART GALLERY Management Office, Public Relations