Misaki Kawai | Cave Life
The Hole
312 Bowery, NYC
Oct 8 – Oct 30
This month, The Hole gallery presents their second solo show by Misaki Kawai, “Cave Life”. Kawai will present large-scale paintings, wall murals and new furniture. Blending European art traditions of “primitivism” and Japanese underground punk sensibilities developed in the 70s, Kawai here plays with lions and tigers, bones and dinosaurs, palm trees, bugs and stranger creations that don’t have a name.
Throughout the space you can sit on painted furniture that broadens her existing repertoire of benches (bananas, boobs and snakes, memorably) here adding bones, meaty bones, lions and tiger benches. From your bone bench you can survey the myriad of paintings in the exhibition; some made with plain black oil stick on canvas that make her playful sketchbook large and lively; others, like the above, with colored painterly backgrounds and an arrangement of black silhouetted shapes across them.
This exhibition began with her travel sketchbooks, and maintains in paint the inventiveness and spontaneity of the small pencil sketches. She has recently exhibited with V1 Gallery in Copenhagen and Loyal Gallery in Sweden, as well as Take Ninagawa in Tokyo; a recent exhibition and solo booth with East Hampton dealer Eric Firestone garnered a lot of attention as well last year. She lives and works in Osaka when not traveling extensively.
The exhibition runs through October 30th.
