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September 3, 2015 – Review
Andrew Kerr’s “The gallery is beside a church, apartments and a small park with fountain”
Stuart Munro
Tokyo’s Rat Hole Gallery is beside a church, apartments and a small park. Removed from the passing traffic, stairs from the street lead to a basement entrance hidden behind frosted glass. By locating them so precisely in the show’s title, Glasgow-based Andrew Kerr suggests the new paintings for his first Japanese solo exhibition have a more intimate relationship with the city they now call home, despite their origin being very distant.
This show picks up where his previous one—“The Other Shop” at Glasgow’s The Modern Institute in 2014—left off. Bringing three dimensions to painting, fixed objects are arranged to document chance moments. It is open to interpretation whether they are seen as flat examinations of a landscape or as landscapes themselves—are these objects or pictures? As in “The Other Shop” the emphasis is on context. Yet in a city like Tokyo, where everything is equally important and simultaneously forgettable, context is a vague and uncertain principle.
Next to the entrance, a single painting on Japanese paper hangs like a reconsidered ukiyo-e, bereft of the figures and scenery we associate with it. The main space holds five small canvases whose sequence is interrupted by four larger, more sculptural works positioned at eye-level (all …