Abstract Resonance: Listening to Shinoda Toko
Information
- Period
- April 3 (Fri.)–June 20 (Sat.)
- Closed
- 2nd and 4th Saturdays, Sundays, national holidays
- Admission
- General 1,000 yen, high school students and younger free of charge
About the Exhibition
This exhibition takes a fresh look at Shinoda Toko’s works from the perspective of music. A leader of abstract expressionist art, Shinoda moved beyond the boundaries of “calligraphy,” to open up her own distinctive world of art. When we look at her works, we can observe many elements throughout them that resonate with musical sensibilities—the melody-evoking brushwork, the empty spaces that resonate with one another, and the coexistence of tranquility and tension in her compositions.
Throughout her life, Shinoda remained deeply interested in music as well as literature. Every stroke of her sumi is replete with the tension of a kind of impromptu performance. Shimmers of gold and silver spread across a canvas like lingering reverberations of sound. This exhibition seeks to detect the artistic qualities of her works from the musical perspectives of “sound,” “rhythm,” and “space” (ma).
The composition of the displays in the galleries consciously sets up dialogue between art and music, allowing us to experience the intersection of the visual and the audible that can reveal the essence of Shinoda’s art. When we see the overlapping and comparison of abstract expressions in painting and in music, we can discover a new dimension of Shinoda Toko’s works that we had not noticed before. Echoes latent in the silences and emotions rising out of the depths of the abstract—when we attune ourselves to these invisible stirrings within her works, we should be able to feel the musical qualities that resonate within them.