Mieko Meguro — Librairie Marian Goodman
The Marian Goodman gallery presents an exhibition of Mieko Meguro in the space of its bookshop, where she displays a variety of portraits of the public figure with whom she shares her life, Dan Graham.
Librairie Marian Goodman — Mieko Meguro, Manga Dan, Sharaku Moments @ Marian Goodman Gallery from November 7, 2019 to January 11, 2020. Learn more Through portraits of their shared intimacy and idealized depictions of the artist, who has been elevated to the rank of public icon, Mieko Meguro weaves her partner, here resembling a grumpy, playful bear, into her personal narrative. This affectionate tale is written in ink and oil, even woven into everyday objects. The contrasts and contradictions of life together appear quickly from the harmless lightness of the images — an accumulation of everyday scenes shakes this narrative, then moves it to cushions, embroidered with the image of Dan Graham wearing a “Fuck Kale” T-shirt. In the meantime, the portrayed artist himself carries on other projects, inviting us to delve into Dan Graham’s œuvre through a selection of films to watch in the gallery space.
The particularly simple style of the portraits, even though it reduces the expression to the essential, says a lot about the artist’s fascination and attention paid to her subject. But it is really in her paintings that Meguro’s ambition becomes visible, constituting an encylopaedia of attitudes of the man she visually interrogates. Meguro draws inspiration from the famous Japanese printmaker Toshusai Sharaku, who shook the world of Japanese ukiyo-e art with numerous unflattering portraits, where the expression and play of masks (thesitters were (space) mostly actors in Kabuki theatre) formed the identity and wherein the poignant truth emerged from the apparent excess.
In turn, through her forcefully empathic gaze, Meguro repeats this representation of implicit allusion to make her subject a public figure that everyone can then appropriate. In a way, by applying an affective filter to the man with whom she shares life, Meguro overflows the apparent naivety to invent a personal mythology that desacralizes precisely this figure of authority in conceptual art whose parallel exhibition in the gallery can be seen looked at in a whole new light.
