12th March – 29th May 2005 

Over the Rainbow – the famous song from the 1939 American film musical ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is the title of an artistic collaboration that was planned some time ago: In the summer of 2004 the Japanese artists Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) and Hiroshi Sugito (b. 1970), who were already good friends, swapped their studios in Tokyo and Nagoya for a shared studio in Vienna and, working together, produced a series of paintings which refer, in terms both of setting and motif, to the fairy-tale classic. In their collaborative practice, Nara’s typical presentation of childlike forms in the tradition of popular [Manga] comics merge with the quiet tones of Sugito’s flat painting of space and landscape. The exhibition features some 35 paintings and dozens of drawings produced in the course of the summer of 2004 in an installation conceived by Nara and Sugito.

Yoshitomo Nara studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie with Michael Buthe and A.R. Penck between 1988 and 1993. Then he spent a few more years in the Rhineland, before returning to Japan. Yoshitomo Nara has invented a cypherlike, figurative pictorial language and is one of the most popular protagonists of contemporary Japanese art. His paintings and objects suit both global mass taste and the more sophisticated aesthetic criteria of visual art.

Nara’s paintings, drawings and sculptural objects lead to a realm of fantasy that appears harmless at first. Under the guise of comics, children’s book illustrations or toys, the small and often grim-looking figures convey the proximity of safety and the abyss.

Hiroshi Sugito grew up in New York and returned to Japan with his family in 1986. It was there that he met Yoshitomo Nara, who taught him drawing in preparation for his studies at art school. The paintings that Sugito has made from the early 1990s create a mysterious, hermetic pictorial world run through by a tangle of enigmatic relationships.

Employing the traditional Japanese painting technique of Nihonga, Sugito produces a multilayered form of painting with exquisite surface effects. Linear pictographs that appear either individually or in ornamental patterns produce a lastingly vexing, visual stimulus on the quiet surfaces of the images.

The formally highly individual artistic approaches of Yoshitomo Nara and Hiroshi Sugito are connected by their shared claim to a poetic extension of contemporary Japanese art that lies beyond the dominant aesthetic of Manga and superflat. By referring to one of Hollywood’s earliest colour films in their collaborative painting, Nara and Sugito draw on nostalgic-looking illusory techniques as well as the cryptic colourism of ‘The Wizard of Oz’. With the almost serious depiction of the film’s little protagonist, Nara and Sugito aim to achieve a synthesis of performative, dynamic cartoon and statuary painting.

Over the Rainbow – Yoshitomo Nara and Hiroshi Sugito is a co-production between K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

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