Atsushi Kaga: The World Will Not End Tomorrow
November 12-December 21, 2024
Jessica Silverman is delighted to announce representation of Atsushi Kaga. His first solo show with the gallery, titled “The World Will Not End Tomorrow,” opens on November 12th. The exhibition includes nine new paintings and two bronze sculptures. Kaga works alone, preferring the contemplative life of a quiet studio to the managerial pressures of an atelier full of assistants. By these means, the artist takes the innovations of his Pop art elders, Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, into new experiential and emotional domains that defy easy categorization in a single artistic genre.
Kaga’s work is relevant to a global world increasingly overrun by AI personalities. Educated in Tokyo and Dublin, with a year spent in Malaga, Spain, the roving artist is aesthetically “bilingual"—accomplished in both the perspectival tricks and chiaroscuro shadows of Europe as well as the flat plains and linear brushwork of East Asia. He is also an acute observer of popular culture, citing the new Japanese slang term, moé, to refer to the empathy, affection, and even adoration people feel toward fictional characters. However, Kaga uses moé hooks to take the viewer beyond the sentimental into the realms of dark humor, social satire, and existential philosophy.
Many of Kaga’s works depict his alter-ego, Usatchi, a rabbit with minimal facial features, who first appeared twenty years ago in the artist’s graduate show. While Kaga initially saw the character as “a punk challenge to the ‘serious,’ a bunny in the face of Gerhard Richter,” he eventually realized that the rabbit was “as autobiographical as Sophie Calle.”
While “Usatchi” is the diminutive form of usagi, the Japanese word for rabbit, it is also a near anagram for the artist’s first name, Atsushi. Kaga’s avatar is not a trickster but a truth-sayer, a benign herbivore who contemplates the cosmos. Kaga’s paintings skew towards nocturnes, so it is relevant that East Asians see a rabbit depicted in the dark patterns of the moon. Every autumn, the Japanese celebrate Tsukimi by holding parties to view the harvest moon, an annual ritual evoked in the painting Full Moon in September (2024).
The ambiguous environments depicted in Kaga’s paintings are neither interiors nor exteriors but manifested inner worlds. Whether domestic and surreal or grand and sublime, they are always highly psychological. In The World Will Not End Tomorrow (2024), Usatchi stands on a tree stump like a sculpture on a pedestal in the middle of a vast mountainous landscape that harks back to Chinese ink-wash works on paper. The stoic bunny holds two black cats, who appear to be both transitional objects that comfort him and offspring that are saved by him. The boundless dark space reverberates with the energy of nature and the odd calm of death. The sheer audacity of this big-picture composition is absurdly amusing.
If The World Will Not End Tomorrow is the location shot of the exhibition, then Feet on the Ground, Please (2024) is the extreme close-up. The four-foot-high bronze sculpture portrays Usatchi striding with a large goopy paintbrush in his left hand. Here, Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man meets Jeff Koon’s carrot-wielding Rabbit. Confident without being cocky (despite the angle of his brush), Kaga’s foray into machismo is an occasion for self-parody. Indeed, the title Feet on the Ground, Please quotes advice often dispensed by Kaga’s late mother. Part of a new generation of men for whom the myth of the virile artistic genius is a profound joke, Kaga’s self-portrait is also an earnest declaration of identity. As the artist explains, “I am a painter who will spend the rest of my life in the pursuit of meaning and beauty like the Japanese masters before me."
Atsushi Kaga (b. 1978, Tokyo, Japan) has enjoyed solo exhibitions at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Ireland; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; mother’s tankstation, Dublin; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; and Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Galerie Haas, Zurich, Switzerland; Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; Powerlong Art Museum, and The Linenhall Arts Centre, Castle, Ireland. Kaga has held residencies in Dublin; Callan, Kilkenny; Washington, CT; Miami; and São Paolo. He has a BA in Fine Art from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. He lives and works between Dublin and Kyoto. Kaga is represented by mother’s tankstation, Maho Kubota, and Jessica Silverman.
