HAGIWARA PROJECTS is pleased to announce the opening of Shunsuke Imai’s exhibition "Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, and White" on July 17. It is the first showcase of new works by the artist at the gallery in four years.

Imai usually creates striped patterns on a computer, prints them onto paper, crumples up that paper to distort the originally straight lines, and finally transfers the warped parts onto canvas. With these colorful depictions of beautifully wavy stripes, Imai continues to fascinate large audiences.

The works he presents this time were created by a slightly different approach. While the basic production process is the same, the original patterns include no stripes or dots, but here Imai exclusively works with monochromatic, equilateral triangles arranged in regular intervals. The colors of those triangles are limited to red, green, blue and yellow.

The question what it means for a painting to consist of “shapes” and “colors” is one part of Imai’s artistic pursuit that is directly reflected in these works. Can there be some kind of illusion evoked through paintings created from elements as minimal as basic colors and evenly distributed triangles? And can fragmentary shapes become parts of appealing images? As the walls of the venue are made of wood, one assumption behind the exhibits is that the backgrounds they are mounted on appear like “colored, shaped elements” too. An additional consideration that inspired the works on display here was the question how the contemporary artist may be able to update the historical contexts of painting with regard to color and composition. The results are light yet abundant accumulations of simple shapes, charged with a sense of presence quite different from the artist’s previous efforts. Against the backdrop of an increasingly unstable society, the exhibition reflects Imai’s ambitious attempt to revert to such commonplace things as shapes, colors, and the experience of their appreciation.

Shunsuke Imai was born in Fukui-prefecture in 1978. He graduated with a MA in the Fine Art Course, Department of Painting from the Musashino Art University in 2004. Selected exhibitions include “range finder” Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim (2019, Neuenhaus, Germany), “Pleased to meet you.New Acquisitions in recent years” Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2019, Tokyo), “Reborn -Update for the Future- Part Ⅱ Creating the Next Stage” Fukui Fine Art Museum (2019, Fukui), “Paintings Here and Now” Fuchu Art Museum (2018, Tokyo), ” KAAT Kanagawa Arts Theatre (2016, Kanagawa), “Through the Window - Contemporary Art in Kasugai” Kasugai City Library, Culture and Art Center, (2016, Aichi), “line & color” HAGIWARA PROJECTS (2015, Tokyo), “VOCA 2015 (Visions of Contemporary Art)” The Ueno Royal Museum (2015, Tokyo), “the way of PAINTING” Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2014, Tokyo), “shiseido art egg vol.8 Shunsuke Imai ‘range finder’” Shiseido Gallery (2014, Tokyo), “surface / volume” HAGIWARA PROJECTS (2013, Tokyo), “surface / volume” LOOP HOLE (2012, Tokyo), “SSS ‒ expanding painting” MIS AKO & ROSEN (2010, Tokyo).