V O G U E | Diaspora: Gestalten Space Berlin

The exceptional illustrator Yuko Shimizu creates her work melding traditional Japanese graphic prints with surreal comic art. Inspired by Matthew Barney, Jean Paul Gaultier, Raymond Pettibon, and eccentric raconteur Momus, the award-winning New York-based artist draws her basic forms and figures with calligraphy brushes and later digitally supplements them with additional colors and backgrounds. This technique results in elegant and harmoniously composed creative visions and science-fiction fantasies, which are often erotically charged and combine the best of American pop and Japanese comic culture.

Yuko Shimizu has won numerous international awards and has done commissioned work for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Playboy, GQ, the New York Times and many more...

A comprehensive collection of Shimizu's different strikes and strokes, this book explores the Japan-born artist's marriage of East and West, commerce and art, mind and matter, sexy heroines and restrained sensuality.

From Yuko Shimizu

© Copyright Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu © Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu @Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu ©Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu @Gestalten 2011

From Yuko Shimizu ©Gestalten 2011

Yuko Shimizu is published by Gestalten-Berlin

Courtesy Yuko Shimizu / Gestalten-Berlin

This post is also featured on the Huffington Post

Assistir Filme »

Cooper & Gorfer consists of the two artists Sarah Cooper (USA, 1974) and Nina Gorfer (Austria, 1979). With their backgrounds in art, architecture, graphic design and photography, they began their collaboration in 2006. Their work belongs to a narrative tradition within photography existing at the intersection of contemporary photography and 18th and 19th century painting. Place and story are the catalysts of their work, transforming narrative and memories into images that are digitally processed to create painterly collages.

For their exhibition My Quiet of Gold, Cooper and Gorfer traveled to the rural areas of Kyrgyzstan to collect sagas and stories in conversations and interviews with local inhabitants. Out of these tales, the duo created striking photographic portraits that go far beyond mere documentation to tell and visually interpret romantic-melancholy stories of love, sorrow, and betrayal in a completely new and non-linear ways.

"Like the portrait in Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Grey', our images show more than just an objective view of the person portrayed. Instead, they also depict something we cannot see - the past, the insubstantial and intangible, where the life and sentiment of the person photographed are woven together with our perception and experience of the moment. In the end, our pictures are the stories' beautiful remains."
~~ Cooper & Gorfer

Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer live and work in Gothenburg, Sweden.

My Quiet of Gold is an exhibition from the renowned Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, and is currently on view at Gestalten Space, Berlin. A book of the same name has also been published, and is available through the gallery.

My Quiet of Gold

© Cooper & Gorfer, Shola and the Cat, 2010