 Izima Kaoru Koike Eiko wears Gianni Versace f a projects is pleased to announce the second exhibition at the gallery of the work of the acclaimed Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru. This exhibition will feature the new series of works: "Koike Eiko wears Gianni Versace". Since 1993 Izima Kaoru has been engaged on the photographic project: "Sitai no aru hukei" (Landscapes with a Corpse). In making these works he invites models and actresses to reveal to him their fantasy of a perfect death, a fantasy which he then brings to realisation. The resulting photo-projects are filmic in structure: they exist as a sequence of images, normally four or five, beginning with a long shot, and ending with a close up. Their titles acknowledge the conventions of fashion photography from which the work springs - Kaoru's own profession before making the crossover to contemporary art, and they draw heavily on the structures of subjectivity, ideals of beauty and suggestions of narrative of that medium. But Kaoru also has a wider subject. His work takes on Japanese and Western preoccupations with death and the taboos that surround it, and operates at the point of the meeting of beauty and horror, which has such rich currency in both Western and Oriental cultures. "Dead, the models in Izima Kaoru's images fantasise both mode and moment of dispatch, order the high fashion appropriate to such violent elimination. Photographed, they rise, wash off the synthetic gore, the mud and sand, and live; never again so perfect as in the dream of their destruction" (Chris Townsend, "Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion since 1970", Thames and Hudson, 2003). Izima Kaoru lives and works in Tokyo, where he founded the magazine "ZYAPPU" in 1994. Exhibition: 28 April - 15 July 2005 Gallery hours: Tue-Fri 10am - 6pm, Sat 12 - 5pm f a projects 1-2 Bear Gardens GB-London SE1 9ED Telephone +44 020.7928 3228 Fax +44 020.7928 5123 Email info@faprojects.com www.faprojects.com |
 |