About Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was born Andrew Warhola on August 6, 1928, in Pittsburgh. He received his B.F.A. from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, in 1949. That same year, he moved to New York, where he soon became successful as a commercial artist and illustrator. During the 1950s, Warhol’s drawings were published in Glamour and other magazines and displayed in department stores. He became known for his illustrations of I. Miller shoes. In 1952, the Hugo Gallery in New York presented a show of Warhol’s illustrations for Truman Capote’s writings. He traveled in Europe and Asia in 1956.

By the early 1960s, Warhol began to paint comic-strip characters and images derived from advertisements; this work was characterized by repetition of banal subjects such as Coca-Cola bottles and soup cans. He also painted celebrities at this time. Warhol’s new painting was exhibited for the first time in 1962, initially at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, then in a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery, New York. By 1963, he had substituted a silkscreen process for hand painting. Working with assistants, he produced series of disasters, flowers, cows, and portraits, as well as three-dimensional facsimile Brillo boxes and cartons of other well-known household products.

Starting in the mid-1960s, at The Factory, his New York studio, Warhol concentrated on making films that were marked by repetition and an emphasis on boredom. In the early 1970s, he began to paint again, returning to gestural brushwork, and produced monumental portraits of Mao Tse-tung, commissioned portraits, and the Hammer and Sickle series. He also became interested in writing: his autobiography, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), was published in 1975, and The Factory published Interview magazine. A major retrospective of Warhol’s work organized by the Pasadena Art Museum in 1970 traveled in the United States and abroad. Warhol died February 22, 1987, in New York.

About Walasse Ting (Ding Xiongquan – 丁雄泉)

Freshness, vitality and brilliant colour characterise Walasse Ting’s depictions of women, flowers, birds and animals executed in a powerful and highly individualistic style. His seductive, magical world is one of sensory pleasure, appealing to all those who share his passion for the beauty of the natural world.

Born in Shanghai in 1929, Ting studied briefly at the Shanghai Art Academy before leaving China in 1946 to come to Hong Kong, where he exhibited a few watercolours at a local bookstore. In 1950 he sailed for France, eventually arriving in Paris without money, friends or lodging. He lived as a poor struggling artist for six years, absorbing the city and for the first time being exposed to Western art, especially the Expressionist movement and the works of Picasso. An important influence was the Belgian artist, Pierre Alechinsky, who discovered Ting sleeping on bare boards in a tiny attic room and became his lifelong friend.

Ting arrived in New York in 1958 at the height of the Abstract Expressionist period. He befriended the American artist, Sam Francis, and the movement had a profound influence on his work. Unlike in Paris, Ting could paint and sell his work. Bold dripping strokes featured in his paintings, which at that time were mainly poetic abstractions in the manner of the Paris-based Chinese artist, Zao Wouki. Only in the 1970s did Ting develop his now distinctive style using Chinese calligraphic brushstrokes to define outlines and filling flat areas of colour with vivid acrylic paint.

After more than 20 years in New York, Ting moved to Amsterdam, where he has a spacious studio. Although he broke away from his Chinese roots so long ago, he finds that the city’s trees and canals remind him of Hangzhou’s West Lake. Today he lives in both New York and Amsterdam, but like Gauguin, he also often visits Tahiti in search of the exotic colours that he loves.

After suffering a severe brain haemorrhage in 2002 he is no longer able to continue his artistic carreer. After being moved from Amsterdam to New York in April 2010 Walasse Ting passed away at the age of 80 on May 17, 2010.

About Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. The son of an academic painter, José Ruiz Blanco, he began to draw at an early age. In 1895, the family moved to Barcelona, and Picasso studied there at La Lonja, the academy of fine arts. His visit to Horta de Ebro from 1898 to 1899 and his association with the group at the café Els Quatre Gats about 1899 were crucial to his early artistic development. In 1900, Picasso’s first exhibition took place in Barcelona, and that fall he went to Paris for the first of several stays during the early years of the century. Picasso settled in Paris in April 1904, and soon his circle of friends included Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Gertrude and Leo Stein, as well as two dealers, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill.

His style developed from the Blue Period (1901–04) to the Rose Period (1905) to the pivotal work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), and the subsequent evolution of Cubism [more] from an Analytic phase (ca. 1908–11), through its Synthetic phase (beginning in 1912–13). Picasso’s collaboration on ballet and theatrical productions began in 1916. Soon thereafter, his work was characterized by neoclassicism and a renewed interest in drawing and figural representation. In the 1920s, the artist and his wife, Olga (whom he had married in 1918), continued to live in Paris, to travel frequently, and to spend their summers at the beach. From 1925 into the 1930s, Picasso was involved to a certain degree with the Surrealists, and from the fall of 1931 he was especially interested in making sculpture. In 1932, with large exhibitions at the Galeries Georges Petit, Paris, and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and the publication of the first volume of Christian Zervos’s catalogue raisonné, Picasso’s fame increased markedly.

By 1936, the Spanish Civil War had profoundly affected Picasso, the expression of which culminated in his painting Guernica (1937, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid). Picasso’s association with the Communist Party began in 1944. From the late 1940s, he lived in the South of France. Among the enormous number of Picasso exhibitions that were held during the artist’s lifetime, those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1939 and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1955 were most significant. In 1961, the artist married Jacqueline Roque, and they moved to Mougins. There Picasso continued his prolific work in painting, drawing, prints, ceramics, and sculpture until his death April 8, 1973.

For buying and selling original work please contact the gallery.

About Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle (Neuilly sur Seine, 1930 – San Diego 2002) started out as a fashionmodel. During a severe breakdown in 1953, she started painting as a therapy. Meeting the artist Jean Tinguely in 1955 meant a great change in both her private and artistic life. After moving in with Tinguely in 1960, he introduced her to the influential museum director Pontus Hulten, who admitted her work to several major exhibitions. In 1961 the exhibition ‘Bewogen beweging’ at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum together with ‘The art of assemblage’ at the New York MoMa and a solo exhibition at the already famous Leo Castelli Gallery made her final breakthrough. Together with her husband Jean Tinguely she produced various sculptures, including the famous fountain at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Her most ambitious project is the sculpture garden in Tuscany, the Tarot Garden, where she created a series of 22 monumental sculptures over the period 1979 to 1996.

Niki de Saint Phalle died may 22, 2002 at the age of 71 from pneumonia.

About Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami (b. 1963), one of the most thoughtful-and thought-provoking-Japanese artists of the 1990s. His work ranges from cartoony paintings to quasi-minimalist sculptures to giant inflatable balloons to performance events to factory-produced watches, T-shirts, and other products, many emblazoned with his signature character, Mr. DOB.

Takashi Murakami was born in Tokyo in 1963 and received his BFA, MFA and PhD from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. He has had recent solo shows at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2003); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2001); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2001); and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris (2001).

In addition to his work as an artist, Takashi Murakami is a curator, entrepreneur, and a student of contemporary Japanese society. In 2000, Murakami curated an exhibition of Japanese art titled Superflat, which acknowledged a movement toward mass-produced entertainment and its effects on contemporary aesthetics. Murakami is also internationally recognized for his collaboration with designer Marc Jacobs to create handbags and other products for the Louis Vuitton fashion house.

Takashi Murakami’s work has been exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and a recent solo retrospective exhibition at the Bard College Museum of Art. Through his work, Murakami has played with these oppositions in East and West, past and present, high art and low culture while remaining consistently amusing and accessible. His work morphs the worlds of popular contemporary Japanese cartoons and historic Japanese painting (he is classically trained, with a Ph.D. in the traditional nihon-ga style). His recurring character, Mr. DOB, appears on t-shirts, posters, key-chains, etc. world-wide and has even come to life in the form of one of these 3-D sculptures. Murakami has also curated “Super Flat” an exhibition of contemporary Japanese artists.

About Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein is a pop art painter whose works, in a style derived from comic strips, portray the trivialization of culture endemic in contemporary American life. Using bright, strident colors and techniques borrowed from the printing industry, he ironically incorporates mass-produced emotions and objects into highly sophisticated references to art history.

Born in New York City in 1923, Lichtenstein studied briefly at the Art Students League, then enrolled at Ohio State University. After serving in the army from 1943 to 1946, he returned to Ohio State to get a master’s degree and to teach.

In 1951, Lichtenstein came back to New York City and had his first one-man show. He also continued to teach, first at the New York State College of Education at Oswego, and later at Douglass College, a division of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Through the 1950s, Lichtenstein used the basic techniques of abstract expressionism, but incorporated into his compositions such themes as cowboys and Indians and paper money. In 1961, however, while at Douglass College, impressed by the work of colleague Allan Kaprow, he turned to the use of comic-strip and cartoon figures by which he is known today. Flatten… sandfleas (1962, Museum of Modern Art) was the first important example of his new style.

Primary colors–red, yellow and blue, heavily outlined in black–became his favorites. Occasionally he used green. Instead of shades of color, he used the benday dot, a method by which an image is created, and its density of tone modulated in printing. Sometimes he selected a comic-strip scene, recomposed it, projected it onto his canvas and stenciled in the dots. “I want my painting to look as if it had been programmed,” Lichtenstein explained.

Despite the fact that many of his paintings are relatively small, Lichtenstein’s method of handling his subject matter conveys a sense of monumental size. His images seem massive.

Since 1962, he has turned to the work of artists such as Picasso, Mondrian, and even Monet as inspiration for his work. In the mid-1960s, he also painted sunsets and landscapes in his by-now familiar style. In addition, he has designed ceramic tableware and graphics for mass production.

“I’m interested in portraying a sort of antisensibility that pervades society,” Lichtenstein says, summing up his work.

For buying and selling works by Roy Lichtenstein please contact the gallery.

For more information about the artist: www.lichtensteinfoundation.org

About Jeff Koons

(b 1955) American artist. He trained at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (BA 1976), and worked as a Wall Street commodities broker before embarking upon his career as an artist. In the 1980s he won international recognition as a radical exponent of Neo-Geo, an American movement concerned with appropriation and parody. Following the example of Pop artists of the 1960s, Koons used his work to reflect the commercial systems of the modern world. He also referred back to the Duchampian tradition, appropriating an art status to selected products. His vacuum cleaners encased in perspex (1980-81; see 1993 exh. cat., pls 5-9) were classified as monuments to sterility. His immaculate replicas of domestic products, advertisements, kitsch toys and models exercised an enthusiastic endorsement of unlimited consumption, unlike the veiled criticism of some work of the first generation of Pop artists. Koons perceived Western civilization as a driven society, flattered by narcissistic images and with a voracious appetite for glamorous commodities. In his expressions of the ecstatic and the banal he did not hesitate to breach the borderlines of taste; in the body of work titled Made in Heaven (1989-91; see 1993 exh. cat., pls 48-65) he featured explicit sexual photographs and models of himself with his wife Ilona Staller (‘La Cicciolina’). Such works were naturally highly controversial.

About Yves Klein

Yves Klein was born April 28, 1928, in Nice. From 1942 to 1946, he studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales and began practicing judo. At this time, he became friends with Arman Fernandez and Claude Pascal and started to paint. Klein composed his first Symphonie monoton in 1947. During the years 1948 to 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan. In 1955, Klein settled permanently in Paris, where he was given a solo exhibition at the Club des Solitaires. His monochrome paintings were shown at the Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, in 1956.
The artist entered his blue period in 1957; this year a double exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Iris Clert and the Galerie Colette Allendy, both in Paris. In 1958, he began using nude models as “living paintbrushes.” Also in that year, he undertook a project for the decoration of the entrance hall of the new opera house in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. The first manifesto of the group Nouveaux Réalistes was written in 1960 by Pierre Restany and signed by Arman, Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and others. In 1961, Klein was given a retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, and his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. He and architect Claude Parent collaborated that year on the design for fountains of water and fire, Les Fontaines de Varsovie, for the Palais de Chaillot, Paris. In 1962, Klein executed a plaster cast of Arman and took part in the exhibition Antagonismes 2: L’Objet at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. Shortly before his death he appeared in the film Mondo Cane (1962). Klein died suddenly on June 6, 1962, in Paris.

About Sam Francis

Sam Francis (1923 – 1994) occupies a prominent position in post-war American painting. Although associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement and Clement Greenberg’s Post-Painterly Abstraction, unlike many American painters of he time he had direct and prolonged exposure to French painting and to Japanese art which had an individual impact on his work.

On leaving the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1944 owing to illness Francis took up painting as a hobby. He decided to make this a serious undertaking studying under David Park in 1947 and completed his BA and MA at the University of California. He was greatly influenced by Abstract Expressionism particularly the works of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock. In his use of space on the canvas to allow free circulation of strong colour and the sensitivity to light Francis developed his own style by the time his studies had ended.

Francis moved to Paris in 1950 where he met Jean-Paul Riopelle who was to remain an important influence, and study of Monet’s Waterlilies had a profound impact on his work. From a very muted palette of greys and whites he returned to the qualities of light and colour producing such works as Big Red 1953. He continues to develop the use of white space and increased the dimensions of his paintings for greater emphasis. During his period in Europe he executed a number of monumental mural paintings.

Francis returned to California in 1962 and was then influenced by the West Coast School’s preoccupation with mysticism and Eastern philosophy. Blue had become a more dominant feature of his work since 1959 inspired by personal suffering and the great joy of becoming a father for the first time in 1961. This led to combinations of hard colour and more disciplined structures with centrally placed rectangles during the 1970s. Eventually these more rigid structures gave way to looser configurations sometimes of snake-like forms with web-like patterns. Blue, sometimes brilliant, remained an important part of many later works.

About Fontana

Lucio Fontana was born February 19, 1899, in Rosario de Santa Fé, Argentina. His father was Italian and his mother Argentinean. He lived in Milan from 1905 to 1922 and then moved back to Argentina, where he worked as a sculptor in his father’s studio for several years before opening his own. In 1926, he participated in the first exhibition of Nexus, a group of young Argentinean artists working in Rosario de Santa Fé. Upon his return to Milan in 1928, Fontana enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, which he attended for two years.

The Galleria Il Milione, Milan, organized Fontana’s first solo exhibition in 1930. In 1934, he joined the group of abstract Italian sculptors associated with Galleria Il Milione. The artist traveled to Paris in 1935 and joined the Abstraction-Création group. The same year, he developed his skills in ceramics in Albisola, Italy, and later at the Sèvres factory, near Paris. In 1939, he joined the Corrente, a Milan group of expressionist artists. He also intensified his lifelong collaboration with architects during this period.

In 1940, Fontana moved to Buenos Aires. With some of his students, he founded in 1946 the Academia de Altamira from which emerged the Manifiesto Blanco group. He moved back to Milan in 1947 and in collaboration with a group of writers and philosophers signed the Primo manifesto dello spazialismo. He subsequently resumed his ceramic work in Albisola to explore these new ideas with his Concetti spaziali.

The year 1949 marked a turning point in Fontana’s career; he concurrently created the Buchi, his first series of paintings in which he punctured the canvas, and his first spatial environment, a combination of shapeless sculptures, fluorescent paintings, and black lights to be viewed in a dark room. The latter work soon led him to employ neon tubing in ceiling decoration. In the early 1950s, he participated in the Italian Art Informel [more] exhibitions. During this decade, he explored working with various effects, such as slashing and perforating, in both painting and sculpture. The artist visited New York in 1961 during a show of his work at the Martha Jackson Gallery. In 1966, he designed opera sets and costumes for La Scala, Milan.

In the last year of his career, Fontana became increasingly interested in the staging of his work in the many exhibitions that honored him worldwide, as well as in the idea of purity achieved in his last white canvases. These concerns were prominent at the 1966 Venice Biennale, for which he designed the environment for his work, and at the 1968 Documenta in Kassel. Fontana died September 7, 1968, in Comabbio, Italy.

About Kees van Dongen

Cornelis Theodorus Marie van Dongen (1877, Delfshaven – 1968, Monte Carlo), Dutch-born French painter, one of the leading Fauvists after Henri Matisse, particularly renowned for his sensuously slender portraits of women. Van Dongen exhibited artistic leanings early in his youth. He attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Rotterdam and moved to Paris at the age of 20.

In the bohemian atmosphere of the Montmartre district, he worked as a house painter, an illustrator for satirical papers, and a café artist. Having made the acquaintance of Matisse, he participated in 1905 in the famous Salon d’Automne, at which the Fauve (Wild Beast) group was given its epithet. In 1907 he was contracted by Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer of Picasso, and his reputation grew. In 1908 he was invited to join the German Expressionist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), centred at the time in Dresden.
Van Dongen’s candid, colouristic portrait style was immensely fashionable by the end of World War 1. The figure of the thin, red-lipped, unmistakably aristocratic woman (as in Woman with Jewels, 1905) became his rather chilling archetype. His portrait of Anatole France (1917) is particulary notable. He also painted numerous richly coloured seascapes and scenes of Paris in an assured, economical style.

About Corneille

Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo (born 1922), better known under his pseudonym Corneille, is a Dutch artist.

Corneille, Cornelis van Beverloo was born in 1922 in Liege in Belgium. Corneille studied art at the Academy of Art in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. He was one of the founders of the Experimentele Groep Holland in 1948 and in 1949 he was also one of the founders of the COBRA group. He was active within the group from the beginning, not only painting but also publishing poetry in the Cobra magazine. The poetic Corneille was strongly influenced by Miro and Klee. After the group dissolved in 1951 he moved to Paris and began collecting African art. These primitive artifacts became evident in his works, which began to take on a more imaginative style, like landscapes seen from a bird’s eye view, exotic birds and stylised forms. Corneille died on september 5, 2010 at the age of 88 in France, where he lived and worked.

About Constant

Constant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys) was born in 1920 in Amsterdam and started his career as a painter. Together with other experimental artist like Corneille and Karel Appel he founded the Dutch Experimental Group. Of the members Constant was the most important theorist and the most engaged in politics. During his stay in Paris in 1946 Constant met Asger Jorn, a Danish experimental artist, and they became friends. Jorn discussed his ideas about purely abstract art being an illusion and found a supporter in Constant. They both agreed on the need for an international experimental group and in November 1948 the CoBrA group (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) was founded in Paris. Collectiveness, experiments and the struggle against the old conventions in art were the most important driving forces within CoBrA. Animals, primitive art, myths, the art of children and the mentally ill were significant sources of inspiration. After several exhibitions, of which Amsterdam 1949 and Liège 1951 were the most important ones, the CoBrA movement seized to exist and the artist went their own way. Constant also moved on. In 1952 he spent less and less time on painting and more time on his ideas about society and art. At that time he experimented with almost purely geometric forms in compositions. During his travels to London and Paris Constant developed theories about a new way of living and he decided to join Asger Jorn in his newly founded group called ‘Mouvement pour une Bauhaus imaginiste’. Around 1956 Constant became more and more interested in architecture which resulted in a project called New Babylon, the creation of the city of the future. He worked on the models of this city from 1956 until 1969 and they were first exhibited in 1962. Constant also had his own ideas about the humans that would live in these new surroundings. They would have a new consciousness and would be free and creative, not burdened by the old traditions in art. Constant has a critical attitude towards society and culture which has generated a diversity of artistic expressions. He has showed the ability to tackle problems and find creative solutions to these artistic difficulties. His recent paintings and watercolours show yet a different side of Constant. Compared to the subjects he used before these almost seem a little decadent. Perhaps, in a way Constant was influenced by Rubens, Titian and Cézanne. This use of softer colours one might not expect from Constant but yet again he proves that the end of his experiments is not in sight.

Constant died august 1, 2005 at the age of 85 in Utrecht, The Netherlands after a long illness.

About

Kees van Bohemen (The Hague 1928 – 1986) was a student at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague from 1943 to 1948. His early work was abstract, particularly during his association with the «Nederlandse Informele Groep» and the «Zéro» group in the period 1959-60, to which Schoonhoven and Armando also belonged. Around 1963 he turned his attention to figurative themes, as we can see from the larger canvases with female nudes which he painted in 1964. His sojourn in the United States in 1966-67 gave rise to striking sporting themes and his journey to Africa in the early 1970’s yielded a series of paintings with themes from the savannah and jungle.

His technique of painting has much in common with the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950’s, although his work shows a pronounced emphasis on the representation of human beings. Van Bohemen has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Jacob Marisprijs in 1966.

About Karel Appel

The Dutch expressionist Karel Appel (1921-2006) studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Amsterdam (1940-1943). In 1948 he helped to create the Experimental Group in Amsterdam, which later formed the basis of CoBrA. He moved to Paris in 1950 and has lived in France ever since. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Appel captured the postwar mood of reconstruction and fresh beginnings by trying to see things with the eyes of a child. Like Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), Appel painted monumental graffiti-like images of people, animals, and primitive carvings, in which influences of late works by Klee, Miro, and Nolde can be detected. About 1953 Appel’s style became more painterly; the figures formed part of a vilently swirling mass of bright paint, like mythical creatures welling up from the unconscious. This surrealist-automatic approach gave way in the 1970s to a more decorative style.

About Peter Anton

Peter Anton (1963, New Haven, Connecticut) is an American artist and sculptor. His primary subject matter is food with an emphasis on chocolates and other sweets. Often referred to as “Candy Warhol,” Anton creates giant realistic sculptures and is best known for his “bigger than life” boxed chocolates.

At times Anton’s studio can resemble a sweet shop since it is filled with dozens of real treats which he uses as models. His beginning process is to eat, smell, feel, study and dissect a new food over and over again in order to hyper-familiarize himself with the new subject. He then begins the long and tedious process of sculpting, carving, sanding, painting, and construction of his mixed media works.

“In my sculptures I like to alter and overstate foods to give them new meanings. I have an innate reverence for the things we eat. Food brings people together and there is no better way to celebrate life. Through the use of humor, scale, irony, and intensity in my forms, the foods we take for granted become aesthetically pleasing and seductive in atypical ways. I like to create art that can lure, charm, tease, disarm and surprise. My sculptures put viewers in a vulnerable state so that I can communicate with their inner selves in a more honest and direct way. I activate the hunger people have for the things that give them pleasure and force them to surrender. The sensual nature of the works stimulates basic human needs and desires that generate cravings and passion.”

Peter Anton

About Ayako Rokkaku, 六角彩子

The artist Ayako Rokkaku (Japan, 1982) made this statement in an interview at the Geisai art fair in 2006 where she participated with her own stand. Kaikai Kiki, the company of the renowned Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami launched the Geisai art fair to support cutting edge upcoming Japanese artists. Rokkaku has won the Scout Prize at Geisai #4 and the prestigious Akio Goto Prize at Geisai #9. Geisai invited high profile industry experts such as Francois Pinault, owner of auction house Christie’s, and the architect Tadao Ando, who both took part on the panel of judges for the ninth edition of the art market. Artist Yoshimoto Nara and David Ellis formed a jury panel in earlier editions of Geisai.

Ayako Rokkaku was born in Chiba-shi, a town situated in the ‘greater Tokyo’ area. She started to paint in 2002 and mastered her own painting technique. She never attended art school, but is completely self-taught. Rokkaku’s iconic style features large, mostly female figures with candid facial expressions full of character. Vividly coloured backgrounds, littered with flowers, tiny figures and rainbow-like smears compose a colourful and happy dream world. The large eyes and long arms of her characters fit within the Japanese manga style, while the bright colours and compositions remind of drawings made by infants. Not coincidentally, as Rokkaku loves the imagination and lack of rules in children’s drawings.

Her unique technique, directly applying the acrylic paint to the canvas using her bare fingers and hands, is easily recognizable in the dynamic and lively compositions. Not limiting herself to traditional media, Rokkaku just as easily transforms pieces of used cardboard and vintage Louis Vuitton Trunks into colourful works of art. She particularly enjoys creating very large paintings of several meters wide and high. The power of her direct approach to the canvas is optimally manifested in her ‘performance paintings’ which she creates live at art fairs and during exhibitions. As an audience of such a happening we get a chance to be part of her world. Ayako Rokkaku nowadays lives and works alternately in Berlin, Porto, Tokyo and Amsterdam. Since 2006 Gallery Delaive is Ayako Rokkaku’s worldwide representative. She has had (solo) exhibitions in numerous galleries and shown on art fairs in Asia, Europe and the U.S.A. Solo exhibitions in the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, The Netherlands and the Meulensteen Danubiana Art Museum in Slovakia attracted thousands of visitors.