HRD FINE ART

Introduction

HRD Fine Art is delighted to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of Shinta Inoue, on view from October 19th through December 14th, 2024. The show will be Inoue's first ever exhibition at the gallery.

Shinta Inoue was born in 1967 in Sakai, Osaka, and he graduated from the Visual Communication Design Course at Kyoto Seika University. Well-versed in music and dance, he started his artist career when still in the university, before going on a tour in Europe for several years as a member of a Wadaiko Japanese drums performance group. After coming back to Japan, he traveled to Europe once again, this time to Dusseldorf in Germany as part of the artist-dispatch program sponsored by Osaka Prefecture and stayed there as a resident artist.

Versatile and with an ever wider range of repertoire, he is most well-known for his lifework "Shepherd" project, which involves improvisationally and randomly displaying sheep-shaped panels in different landscapes. The past "Shepherd" projects have taken place in Germany, China, Inner-Mongolia, Bali, and many other places around the globe. His recent projects include stage designs for Japan's traditional Noh play, community art and hospital art initiatives that involve workshop-style co-creation activities.

This exhibition focuses on Inoue's paintings, which can be seen as his starting point in his vast and multi-dimensional art creations. Highlighting his unique painting technique using his bare fingers, we will showcase Inoue's paintings that depict fantastical, dream-like scenes imbued with rich narrative.

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Artist's Statement

I will exhibit some of the paintings that I have been making for a very very long period of time.
I was hospitalized due to a cerebral bleeding in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I was one step short of death when something showed me a sign to live a bit longer.
And now, I feel the joy of being allowed to live every single day.

The world beyond death attracts me.
But it also feels good to draw as I get closer to death.
It's beautiful - the process where everything starts from a blank white canvas and eventually it will cease to exist.

All my artworks in this exhibition have never been shown elsewhere before.
They could have been my posthumous works.
Please remember me as a weird artist who existed from 1967 to 2024, always immersing himself in the world of flat surface.

- Shinta Inoue