photo: KIOKU Keizo

Untitled

ArtistKONISHI Toshiyuki
Year2016
Material/ Techniqueoil on paper
Size/ DurationH30 × W39cm
Copyright Notice© KONISHI Toshiyuki
Year of acquisition/ donation2017(寄付採納年月日:2017/02/03)
DescriptionBorn in Hiroshima, Japan in 1980. Lives and works there.

Completed his postgraduate studies in oil painting at Musashino Art University in 2007. Since his student days, he has been painting human figures primarily in oils, many of them portraits based on photographs of his own family, employing an original technique that makes it difficult to distinguish the ethnicity, age or gender of the figures. However, everything about the manner of the figures suggests a level of intimacy peculiar to families, indicating that the behavior and actions people demonstrate towards only their relatives are themselves an important theme for the artist.

Using photographs taken in the past, Konishi paints figures based on members of his own family and other people close to him. The non-specific nature of his figurative expression throws into relief the behavior and gestures peculiar to such relationships, and it could be said that this focuses our attention on blood and community-based relationships in contemporary society, which some regard as becoming diluted as a result of the rise of the nuclear family. The blurry, highly anonymous features of the figures are depicted using abstracted, symbolic elements. These are rendered by applying paint in layers with rapid, swelling brushstrokes and immediately wiping it off with his fingers or a cloth.In his paintings produced on smooth, pure white paper, he takes full advantage of the properties of these materials in creating painterly space in which the presence of his motifs is firmly established by skillfully manipulating the contrast between highly transparent bright colors and dark colors while at the same time moving his brush freely in all directions.

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