ART-PRESENTATION: Yutaka Sone-Day and Night

Yutaka Sone is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His great love and fascination for nature, combined with a totally open approach to life and art galvanizes a highly unconventional art. The work of Japanese-born, Yutaka Sone encompasses essentially all the mediums available to a contemporary artist: painting, sculpture, video, drawing and performance.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Yutaka’s Sone solo exhibition “Day and Night” features a new group of canvases depicting scenes at night. The motifs were taken from the artist’s large-scale, white marble sculptures and respectively show an amusement park roller coaster, Los Angeles highway intersection, and Hong Kong and Manhattan cityscapes. With their black backdrops illuminated by brightly painted artificial lights, the paintings contrast with the purity of their sculptural counterparts, yet similarly present their subjects as archetypal landscapes somehow unaffected by the life that circulates within them. The marble sculpture “Movie Theater” continues Sone’s interest in rendering light in three dimensions. For his earlier “Light in between Trees series”, shards of light surrounding snowcapped trees or stumps were given physical form, welding abstract and figurative shapes. Here, a beam emerging from a projection window materializes into a large triangular geometrical object hovering over the audience as a roof. Also on view are life-sized sculptures of palm trees, which embody the ongoing dialogue within Sone’s oeuvre between natural and man-made structures. Made in collaboration with local artisans in the Michoacán region of Mexico, the trees are meticulously crafted from rattan, which is woven around a metal armature. The sculptures are juxtaposed with sky and palm tree head paintings that Sone creates from his garden in Los Angeles. Measuring between one and two meters tall, these new works are Sone’s largest in the medium to date.

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, New York, Duration: 7/1-20/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com