Icar Press Release

Art / Research 2000 Program, Part V
October 3 - December 16, 2001
 
 Akira Arita
Paintings + Drawings, 1987 - 1995

Icar (Institute for the Cooperation of Art and Research) presents Part V at 159 Quai de Valmy 75010 Paris: the first exhibition in

 
France of Japanese painter Akira Arita, who lives and works in New York.

The exhibition includes a group of paintings with sequences of cylinders and toroids as motifs.  Meticulously rendered in a large format, these geometric forms seem to extend beyond their boundaries into "formless nothingness" and hover there between realism and abstraction.  Reflecting the limits of Arita's preoccupation with the notion that "color is the form and form is the color," these works conjure up a space odyssey for the eye through the dense pictorial plane.

Following earlier exhibitions in Icar's Art/Research 2000 Program: photographs by John Coplans, sculptures by Dennis Oppenheim, installations by William De Lottie, and architectural models of Vito Acconci/Acconci Studio, Arita's exhibition is also designed to interact with the open architectural space of Icar-Paris, as conceived by painter Rens Lipsius.  Arita's commitment to painting as the source of individual inquiry highlights the research thematic of the Program.

Drawing freely on his multicultural relationship to Euro-American and Asian artistic tradition in music, poetry, and visual arts, Arita merges different pictorial elements and concepts in his work.  Consciously or unconsciously responding to the task confronting the painter today, Arita reconfigures a traditional oriental sense of passage into a singular artist/viewer visual space: "…a painting can only come into existence between the one who creates and the one who observes."  Since to Arita "there is no such thing as completing or finishing a painting," he leaves this possibility, and responsibility, to the viewer by simply "putting down the brushes." 

Akira Arita, born in Osaka, Japan in 1947, moved to the United States in 1966 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 1970.  Arita's works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Japan.  He is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts award in the U.S.A (1985) and The Japan Art Grand Prix (1991). Arita lives and works in New York. 

For additional information about the exhibition and other Icar programs, please contact Icar-Paris.