The Realms of Gold
The Realms of Gold is a group museum exhibition coming to Mallorca next month.
The exhibition will feature Kumiko Okamoto-Paulish, a resident of Porreres, Hisako Kobayashi, Jill Krutick and Tatsuya Kubota.
Overlapping exhibitions at different locations in New York, France and Japan have helped ally these artists. An appreciation for each other’s work has grown, tightening the bond. Kumiko Okamoto-Paulish, a local Mallorca artist established a relationship with the Museu de Porreres, a historic museum featuring local and international artists, making this exhibit possible. The artists will all be uniting together for the first time in Mallorca, travelling from afar as field as Japan and New York. The show will run next month from August 9 to August 16.
A range of artistic styles will be presented at the exhibition from traditional Japanese ink on paper, and egg tempura on canvas to abstract oil and acrylic on paper and canvas. Each artist draws from their history and life experiences to capture their unique story.
Hisako Kobayashi has been showing her art for three decades on four continents–work that combines the influences of a person who still feels strong affinity for her native Tokyo, but who also received training at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and who has lived in Manhattan for most of her adult life. The dean of art critics, Donald Kuspit, has devoted an essay to Hisako’s work. Kuspit contrasts her art with Jackson Pollock’s, observing: “Kobayashi’s slower moving, more intimate paintings–their more tender surface drawing us into the sensual depths, luring our psyche rather their overwhelming it, their calmer gestures softly touching the canvas rather than brusquely thrown down on it, their refined painterliness at odds with Pollock’s raw painterliness—embody the feminine sublime.” Hisako recently sold a second work to art collector and critic Christopher Rothko, author of a book on the work of his father, 20th-century painter Mark Rothko, one of the artists who has most inspired her.
Tatsuya Kobota was born in Tokyo in 1952. His varied career has included employment at Tokyo Disneyland, plus numerous adventures in all parts of the world. His artistic themes are based on surreal experiences he has had in his adventurous life. “I think we recognize the existence of a living world,” he reflects, “as opposed to the existence of a world in which we live, because there exists a world apart from the living. In that sense, I draw pictures of what I experience when dying.” The works in this exhibition are drawn with ink and brush on Japanese wash paper. In Japan, paintings like this are called “ink paintings.” It is a technique to express emotion through dark and light black without using color. “What I want to express,” says Kubota, “is life and death with a Japanese sensibility.”
A collage of the four artists exhibiting: Top left: Hisako Kobayashi – Top right: Kumiko Okamoto – Bottom left: Tatsuya Kubota – Bottom right: Jill Krutick
Kumiko Okamoto-Paulish was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1950 and received education in traditional Japanese charcoal and pencil drawing techniques from an early age. From 1968, Okamoto-Paulish received formal education in Product Design at the prestigious Tama Art University in Tokyo and graduated in 1972. After working under Luigi Colani in Berlin, Germany, Kumiko studied Art History at the University of Hamburg, Germany, as well as Textile Design at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. In 1975, Hamburg, her academic work, “The influence of Japansese Art on European Art” was published. Furthermore, she worked at the Hamburg office of the renowned Japansese advertising agency, Hakuhodo, as a graphic designer and coordinator. In Japan, Okamoto-Paulish undertook further extensive explorations in traditional Japanese painting techniques in her paintings; she sets a special focus on ‘egg tempera’, a traditional technique of the European Renaissance.
Jill Krutick is a contemporary abstract expressionist whose paintings trace the artist’s joyful path of self-discovery and creative exploration. Using only texture, line, and colour, the artist suggests the intense beauty and constant flux of nature: galaxies, skies, blossoms, and tides. Influenced by modern and contemporary masters such as Van Gogh, Monet, and Gerhardt Richter, Krutick combines abstract expressionist gestures, impressionist luminosity, and personal symbols of change. Krutick painted privately for over 40 years and studied at The Art Students League of New York. In 2010, she began exhibiting her work and has seen her career blossom with over 100 global collectors, including museums and corporations.
Interestingly, Jill’s Dreamscape Series embraces many of Mallorca’s natural elements as well as that intimate relationship between the sky and the sea. This can be seen in the painting below where as Jill says: “Balance remains my main goal, I strive to capture basic natural elements – earth, water, sun, and sky — contrasting light and dark in order to capture movement through a variety of textures.”
Dreamscape by Jill Krutick
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For more information head over to Museu de Porreres website
If you visiting this exhibition in the town of Porreres don’t miss out on tasting some lovely wines at the Mesquida Mora Winery on the edge of the town. You can read more about it here.
