Solo Exhibition Hideki KIMURA － Celadon・Water Bird －

Hideki Kimura, a leading contemporary printmaker and a painter who has been active in Japan and overseas since the 1970s, will present his first solo exhibition in four years at imura art gallery.

Since making a spectacular debut as a print artist, Kimura has produced a stream of works fusing paintings and prints, using mainly the silkscreen method and various surfaces such as paper, glass, and canvas. In the 1980s he created the ‘Water Bird Series’ expressing images of water birds through silkscreen printing. Now, some 40 years later, the artist has returned to this series with a new choice of medium: ceramics.

The exhibition will feature nine new creations, including two three-dimensional mixed media works that surround a celadon water bird with ripple-pattern tiles—‘Celadon・Lake’ and ‘Celadon・A Water Bird on the Pool’—and silkscreen prints using photographic images of celadon water birds. The ‘Celadon Water Birds and Ripple-pattern Tiles’ pieces, the central elements of this showing, were crafted through complex process in which Kimura created plastic water birds and rippled tiles using a 3D software and printer, manually shaped them, made plaster molds of them, and then made clay castings that he dried, bisque fired, and glaze fired. Be sure to savor these new works that embody Kimura’s affection for the Awata ware ceramics business that used to be run by his family.