Rosha Yaghmai: The Courtyard
Tatsuo Kawaguchi: Early Work 1964-1975
May 19–July 8, 2017
Opening: Friday, May 19, 7–9pm
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
1201 South La Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90019
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present The Courtyard, an exhibition of new sculptural works by Rosha Yaghmai. This will be the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.
Yaghmai creates objects that locate an uncanny familiar relationship to the subject and the viewer. Her practice is rooted in psychedelic concepts, exploring themes of reality and transformation. Often her exhibitions can be better understood as large-scale installations with many parts, suggesting scenes or a series of events. Her work stems from an ongoing experimentation with materials, most recently incorporating electric pipes, rust, produce bags, zinc oxide, corrective lenses, silicone, quilting cotton, brick, cement, asphalt and so on.
For her exhibition, Yaghmai takes the site of a courtyard and explores the public-private binary through a psychedelic lens. The Courtyard is a site for internal contemplation at the same time an environment exposed to the public eye. It is a performative space in which there is a dialouge between the artist and the audience intended to cultivate a psychological narrative. The scene consists of an open area – or a courtyard – that is enclosed by walls on all four sides. Yaghmai’s sculptures placed throughout the yard waffle between the familiar and the unfamiliar; rusted pipes and melted lenses imbued with iridescent garbage reference street signs and lamp posts, UV lit, fiberglass casted arches are fabricated in the likeness of a late 80s California park bench. Along the perimeter of the set hang skin-like silicone windows and doors suggesting the existing private space beyond the courtyard.
Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2007. Solo and two-person exhibitions include: Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, LA; Weiss Berlin; Commonwealth & Council, LA; Tif’s Desk, LA/Miami; Thomas Solomon Gallery, LA.
In the South Gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present Early Work 1964-1975, an exhibition by Tatsuo Kawaguchi, in its South gallery. This will be Kawaguchi’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery.
In 1965, Kawaguchi became a key figure in the postwar Japanese avant-garde by co-founding Group “i” (meaning “unit”), a collective seeking to eliminate emotion and subjectivity in pursuit of an “impersonal,” cerebral art. Today Kawaguchi’s diverse practice is still largely driven by themes he began investigating in the 1960s: removing his ego from art-making; reaching viewers through thoughts and concepts, not sentiment; and visualizing the invisible.
Kayne Griffin Corcoran will exhibit selections from Kawaguchi’s system-based paintings (1964-65); his Interrelation series (1967-69), which visualizes individuals’ connections to society via labyrinths of colorful wires; and his mirror sculptures (1967-68), which re-orient our experience by revealing gaps between perception, imagination, and reality.
Also on view will be Bottle (1968) and a piece from the Iron of Iron and/or Tools series (1975), in which Kawaguchi playfully dismantles the relationship between language and objects. The exhibition concludes with works documenting his important experiential installations Dark (1968) and Exposure (1971), where Kawaguchi transformed light and its absence into new understandings of sight and time.
Tatsuo Kawaguchi was born in Kobe, Japan in 1940 and earned a BFA from Tama University of Fine Art, Tokyo, in 1962. He has shown extensively in Japan and internationally since, including in such historically significant exhibitions as the 10th Tokyo Biennale (1970), the 1973 Paris Youth Biennale, and Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1989). His work resides in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, among others. He lives and works in Chiba, Japan.
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