Yuko Shiraishi's work at once engages and informs the viewer - and is inspired in part, from European colour field paintings by superimposing different hues layer by layer.
Shiraishi's work not only provides a new interpretation of painting but will be viewed in a unique way - as a site-specific installation on the walls and ceilings in the architecturally dynamic upper gallery.
The gallery's curved 'wave-like' wall will be the starting point of Shiraishi's site-specific installation painting hues of colours into the deep curve of the gallery's wall.
Accompanying the installation will be seven large-scale canvases and over twenty box paintings from an ongoing project.A dialectic between the Eastern and Western comprehension of language informs her approach to visual communication. The idea of "tacit understanding", an understanding through silence which is rooted in Japanese culture is evident in her approach to painting.
The critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote of her pure and quiet abstract works: "It strikes me that she collects colour in the way that a scientist collects samples or a butterfly collector collects butterflies"
Born in Tokyo in 1956, Yuko Shiraishi left Japan in 1974 to live in Vancouver for three years before permanently settling in London in 1977. She has successfully exhibited to great acclaim internationally and her recent exhibitions include As Dark as Light, St. Ives Tate Gallery (1999), Shigeru Yokota Gallery, Tokyo (2001), Colour - A Life of its Own, Kunsthalle Budapest, Hungary (2002), Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, (2002) and Infinite Line Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2002).
Yuko Shiraishi is represented by Annely Juda Fine Art, London
