2024.5.10

Keisuke Shirota “Waves and Sea”

Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present a solo exhibition titled “Waves and Sea” featuring new artworks by artist Keisuke Shirota from May 25 (Sat) to June 23 (Sun).

Shirota’s works expand beyond the edges of the incorporated photographic images, adding oil painted extensions of a scene to visualize the uncertainty of memory that lies just beyond vision – inviting the viewer to meditate on what it truly means to see. The painted areas around the photographs leverage cues from the original images to extend the scene, but the intentional misalignment and intermittent white margins elicit the fragmented, halting, and often ambiguous nature of memory. While leaving these purposeful traces as he works, Shirota stitches together multiple disparate images into a resulting unified whole.

Shirota’s third solo exhibition at Maki Fine Arts showcases his new series of seascapes; a familiar and universal motif plucked from Shirota’s daily life.

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Waves and Sea

It has been eight years since I moved to a city by the sea. While not particularly engaged in seaside amusements as such, as I’ve strolled the shores, watched the waves, and spent time with my children there, the seaside has become part of my daily life. Living in a country surrounded on all sides by water with as much seismic activity as this one, living near the sea does carry its risks, but I like to think I understand them well. 

Reflecting on the benefits and risks of the ocean has led me to create many paintings and photographs on the theme and each time I look seaward, art seems to track its way across the recesses of my mind. Although I understand full well that the ocean has been explored as a theme by many before me, I’ve come to feel it inevitable that I too must explore her depths. My process typically begins with reconsidering random pairings of nondescript photographs taken from daily life, but this is the first time I’ve shot a body of images centered around a single theme. 

The photographs used in the works presented in this exhibition were selected from a body of more than two thousand, but the many photos I didn’t take, and paintings I didn’t paint outnumber even those. Without the endless sea of choices not made – appearing and disappearing like waves crashing on the shore – the works collected here could not exist. 

Keisuke Shirota

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Keisuke Shirota
Born 1975 in Kanagawa, Japan. His recent exhibitions include Yokosuka felt by parent and children. Works born from child rearing ( group, YOKOSUKA ART CENTER, 2023), Beyond the Frame (two person,  haco -art brewing gallery- , 2023), ( group, Chigasaki City Museum of Art, 2022), Out of the frame (solo, Maki Fine Arts, 2022), Over (solo, Maki Fine Arts, 2021), PAINT,SEEING PHOTOS (solo, Chigasaki City Museum of Art, 2019-2020). 

2023.4.16

Group Show
Glen Baldridge, Holly Coulis, Alex Dodge, Keisuke Shirota

Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present a group show featuring new and recent works by four artists starting Saturday, May 13, through June 25, 2023.

Glen Baldridge
Born in 1977, Nashville, Tennessee. Recent shows include Wigwag (solo, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, 2023), What Now Who How (solo, Halsey McKay Gallery, 2022), No Way (solo, Halsey McKay Gallery, 2019). His works have been added to collections at Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, RISD Museum.

Holly Coulis
Born in 1968, Toronto, Canada. Recent shows include Sun Shift (solo, Cooper Cole Gallery, 2023), Eyes and Yous (solo, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, 2022), Orbit (solo, Philip Martin Gallery, 2021). Her works have been added to collections at Blanton Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Art.

Alex Dodge
Born 1977 in Denver, Colorado. His recent shows include Personal Day (solo, BB&M, 2023), Laundry Day : It all comes out in the Wash（solo, Maki Fine Arts, 2021), (solo, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, 2020), Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018-2019). His works have been added to collections at Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, RISD Museum.

Keisuke Shirota
Born 1975 in Kanagawa, Japan. His recent exhibitions include Beyond the Frame (two person,  haco -art brewing gallery- , 2023), Out of the frame (solo, Maki Fine Arts, 2022), Over (solo, Maki Fine Arts, 2021), PAINT,SEEING PHOTOS (solo, Chigasaki City Museum of Art, 2019-2020). His works have been added to collections at Chigasaki City Museum of Art.

2023.11.12 Artist

Keisuke Shirota

November 9 – December 23, 2023
Yokosuka Art Center

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2022.2.8

Keisuke Shirota “Out of the frame”

Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present Out of the frame, a solo show by Keisuke Shirota, starting Saturday, March 26, through Sunday, April 24, 2022. Shirota’s works combining photographs with paintings have been showcased in numerus shows including PAINT, SEEING PHOTOS at the Chigasaki City Museum of Art in 2019. In his second solo show with Maki Fine Arts, he will present new works that utilize snapshots that have been augmented by painting beyond the borders. His new works are based on his representational work “A Sense of Distance” he began creating around 2003. Misalignments created from overlapping photographs and voids (frames) formed through the drawings make the viewer notice the ambiguity found in the act of looking. At same time, Shirota’s works hint at the complex relationship between photography and painting.

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Out of the frame

One photograph. When staring at a single image, what flickers through my mind is the other possibilities–what ended up outside the frame. Pressing the shutter and taking the photograph is certainly one option. Regardless of the intention–whether it was to record a decisive moment or a boring, ordinary moment in time–unless you chose the path of not documenting the moment, there is no other way but to press the shutter to capture an image. The act of photography, regardless of one’s skill level, always involves choosing to frame a certain moment. On the flip side however, doesn’t it also simultaneously create numerous un-selected moments and frames? Even with the seemingly unlimited potential to film endless moments courtesy of today’s digital devices and smart phones, I am unable to dismiss these thoughts that intensify further. The time I spend looking at the photos seem to double as a time to confront the other possibilities that have spilled over from the chosen option.

The un-captured alternative option. The other could-have-been-selected frame.
As I negotiate with the limit created by the frame of the canvas, I treat the photograph as an access point to the other possibilities, adding brush strokes around it. The more I try to be faithful to the photograph, the tangibility of the gaps between photo and body; photography and painting; and record and memory increase. It goes without saying, the field that was drawn is only one possibility out of an infinite number of possibilities.

Kaisuke Shirota

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Keisuke Shirota
Born 1975 in Kanagawa, Japan, Shirota received his M.F.A from Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Design in 2003. His recent exhibitions include Over (solo, Maki Fine Arts, 2021), PAINT, SEEING PHOTOS (solo, Chigasaki City Museum of Art, 2019-2020), Tracing / Background (solo, Base Gallery, 2013), Shell Artist Selection (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2013), Photo Reference: Photographic Image in Contemporary Japanese Art Practices (Belgrade Cultural Center, 2012), and his solo show at Galerie Stefan Röpke (2010).

2023.8.9 Artist

Keisuke Shirota – five

August 9 – 21, 2023
Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery

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2023.2.13

Keisuke Shirota “Over”

Maki Fine Arts is pleased to present Over, a solo show by Keisuke Shirota, from Friday, January 8 through February 7, 2021. Shirota’s works combine photo snapshots with paintings, sometimes drawing fictional images beyond the borders of the photograph and sometimes erasing just the people captured in environmental photos by painting over them. His works have recently been exhibited in his solo show PAINT, SEEING PHOTOS at the Chigasaki City Museum of Art (2019-2020). In Shirota’s first show at Maki Fine Arts, Over will focus on the artist’s new works.

Shirota’s depictions use photographs as medium and are constructed through additions, subtractions, or transfers. For additions, fragments of an image are added. For subtractions, the fragments are eliminated. And for transfers, parts of other materials are copied. In his new work “August 15, 2020 (Nijubashi Bridge),” only the tourists are depicted on the canvas after their images have been selectively extracted from photographs capturing scenes of the Nijubashi Bridge. For the base, photo clippings from several newspapers dated August 15, 2020 have been plastered onto the support medium and painted over with white paint. At close examination, traces of the newspaper layers are visible from the sides.

In the age where photograph and image are often thought as synonymous and the definition of photograph blurred due to the prevalence of social media, Shirota provokes the viewer to look at the substance of the photograph through the process of drawing.

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To pay close attention to both the excessive image information–which can never be thoroughly seen–as well as the single image.
To realize that while the front of a photograph is full of substantial information, the back is completely blank.
To bring out what could not be seen through structure.
To recognize that the act of painting and drawing are akin to the act of erasing and concealing.
To understand that the plus and the minus progress simultaneously.

These were the things that were especially important to my creative process during the past year.

Keisuke Shirota

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Keisuke Shirota
Born 1975 in Kanagawa, Japan, Keisuke Shirota received his M.F.A from Tokyo University of The Arts, Department of Design in 2003. His recent exhibitions include PAINT, SEEING PHOTOS (solo, Chigasaki City Museum of Art, 2019-2020), Tracing / Background (solo, Base Gallery, 2013), Shell Artist Selection (The National Art Center, Tokyo, 2013), Photo Reference: Photographic Image in Contemporary Japanese Art Practices (Belgrade Cultural Center, 2012), and his solo show at Galerie Stefan Röpke (2010).

2023.8.1 Artist

Keisuke Shirota – “Recent Discovery” CADAN × ISETAN ART GALLERY

August 2 – 15, 2023
Isetan Shinjuku Store Main Building 6F art gallery

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2023.1.31 Artist

Keisuke Shirota – Uraraka Painting Festival

Beyond the Frame
February 4 – 19, 2023
haco – art brewing gallery –

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2022.6.24 Artist

Keisuke Shirota – Chigasaki City Museum of Art

July 16 – September 4, 2022
Chigasaki City Museum of Art

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