September 1–October 15, 2023
Ulala Imai in the company of Thomas Moran & Soshiro Matsubara
The third presentation of A Lover’s Discourse features a large new painting by artist Ulala Imai (b.1982, Kanagawa, Japan), which the artist chose to exhibit alongside a 1913 landscape by Hudson River School artist Thomas Moran and a contemporary ceramic wall sconce by Soshiro Matsubara. Imai paints scenes drawn from both her familial life and popular culture. She works in her home, transforming her children’s toys, quotidian foods—such as fruit and buttered toast—and other household items into compelling subjects, repositories for the more universal human exchanges surrounding them. Her style is deeply engaged with Western traditions of figurative painting across landscape, portraiture, and still life, from Piero della Francesca’s calm visual vocabulary to Diego Velázquez’s quick touch to Paul Cézanne’s existentially charged disruption of perspective. Imai’s new painting on display at Aspen Art Museum titled Lovers (2023) is exemplary of one of the artist’s recurring subjects, casting the Peanuts characters of Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt as uncanny anthropomorphized toy-friends amidst natural settings. The juxtaposition of Lovers with Moran’s exquisite landscape Grand Canyon of Arizona from Hermit Rim Road directs our attention to Imai’s ability to capture the awe-inspiring and sublime qualities of a view worthy of contemplation. The artist’s appreciation of one’s environment in all its details, be it real or fictional, is echoed in Matsubara’s delicate wall lamp in glazed ceramic, which additionally points to the emotional dimension of objects and their power to stage elusive mirrors of human life.
Ulala Imai was born in 1982 in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, where she continues to live and work. She received her undergrad- uate degree with a concentration in painting from Tama Art University in 2004. She was raised in a creative household where her father, Shingo Imai, painted in the Western tradition. With his encouragement, she started painting at an early age and was ex- posed firsthand to pre-modern and modern painters during family trips to Europe. Imai’s recent solo exhibitions include The Scene , Karma, New York, NY (2022); Rem- iniscence , Union Pacific, London (2022); Melody, Parco Museum, Tokyo (2021); Hola Strangers, Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico (2021); Amazing , Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles (2020). Selected group exhibitions include Public Private , curated by Jareh Das, Pond Society, Shanghai, China (2023); The Postmodern Child , Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, Korea (2023); Blue Wind , High Art, Arles, France (2023); La proie et l’ombre , Crèvecœur, Paris, France (2022); Bodyland , Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany (2022); VOCA, Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2021); Still Time , Fitzpatrick Gallery, Paris, France (2021); and Natsuyasumi: In the Begin- ning Was Love , Nonaka-Hill, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2021). Ulala Imai’s artworks are included in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the High Museum, Atlanta, GA, USA; He Art Museum, Guangdong Province, China; and Space K/ Kolon Museum, Seoul, Korea.
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List of works
Ulala Imai Lovers , 2023 Oil on canvas. 76 3/8 × 102 in. Courtesy the artist, Nonaka-Hill, and Union Pacific Thomas Moran Grand Canyon of Arizona from Hermit Rim Road , 1913
Chromolithograph. 26 1/2 × 35 1/8 in. Collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick
Soshiro Matsubara Last Night XLV , 2023 Glazed on ceramic, oil, lightbulb. 15 × 11 3/8 × 2 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist and Union Pacific, London
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