Motoko Dobashi — S.U.D — Galerie Laurent Mueller — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 8 → February 28, 2015

The Japanese artist Motoko Dobashi realises works on paper, collages and installations that are influenced by the spatial characteristics where she works. From her culture, she derives a practice of painting directly on architectural elements, perturbing the static shapes by inserting landscapes whose expansion seemingly menace the limits of the architecture. These illusions replace the actual space and offer the visitor a parallel world to discover.

The details observed in these spaces of intervention often influence the creation of Dobashi’s dreamscapes. Thus, for her latest intervention on the walls of the Parisian department store Bon Marché “Entrée sur l’Art Contemporain” project space (until January 31st), ivy pierces through clouds in reference to the escalator nearby.

For her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Motoko Dobashi continues to examine the switch from reality to fiction as well as the dialogue between nature and architecture. Here, taking the form of an imaginary voyage documented in a sketchbook together with an installation reminiscent of an artefact. In the manner of the sketches realised by explorers of faraway lands, the artist’s drawings precisely describe the constructions and usages of an unknown civilisation, even more accentuated through their sepia colour.
The Leaves series shows strange structures erected between palm trees. From the way these structures are concentrically organised and harmonically distributed in the landscape, we can imagine a sacred intent as mysterious and inaccessible as the constructions in Stonehenge or on Easter Island. Through their fragile vegetal nature, Dobashi’s imaginary monuments contrast however with the robustness of stone, thus rejoining the line of precarious architectures that Motoko Dobashi creates to constantly recall the force of nature and our own fragility.

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Motoko Dobashi, born 1976 in Tokushima, Japan.
Holds a Master from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich and a Bachelor from the Musashino Art University Tokyo. Among others, she has shown in Berlin, Munich and Istanbul and received the study grant from the Japanese cultural agency (Bunkacho) for her residency at the ISCP in New York. Among her latest group exhibitions were Domani The House of Future, National Art Center, Tokyo (2014),, Reits, SchauFenster, Berlin (2013) and Met andere ogen, Teylers Museum, Harlem (2012). Her work is in the collections of Ernst & Young, the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. She currently shows an in situ installation at the Bon Marché, Paris L’Entrée sur l’Art Contemporain project space.