TREVOR SHIMIZU – PAST/FUTURE
2024-04-15Using paint as a means to engage with his environment, Trevor Shimizu’s work has always taken its cues from whatever subject is “at hand” – a sentiment famously attributed to impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard. Over the past several years Shimizu’s environment has changed. Whereas his earlier work reflected the roles taken up and activities that filled his life in New York City, his recent paintings are a means of processing his life and studio now oriented away from the metropolis and situated on the Hudson River. His current landscape paintings, as such, are made with and through his various modes of contact – both psychic and physical – with his surroundings.
Recalling the interminable interest in, for example, the changing light of the scenery that drove the work of the Hudson River School painters, Shimizu’s recent works are preoccupied with the limitlessness of material possibilities in the landscape, or the working through of different colour combinations on the canvas. On their large scale, and painted ambidextrously, Shimizu’s technical approach to these works is embodied; the physical act of painting evident in their construction. In this way his recent work is influenced as much by the corporeal performativity of abstract expressionism as it is the choreographic and conceptual performance practices of the post-war period.
Opposite – Roses, Dahlias, Daffodils, 2024
Exhibition runs through to May 18th, 2024
Modern Art
4-8 Helmet Row
EC1V 3QJ
London
