Pierre-Yves Caër Gallery, Paris
Solo show, 10/13-12/25/2017
“IMPROMPTUS”
INAUGURAL ELEGANCE
Yuki Onodera is an unconventional, experimental and talented artist.
Yuki Onodera is undeniably an unconventional artist. Among renowned contemporary photographers, few have been successful in producing series so different from one another than Yuki. At a time when all smartphone owners are now photographers and when access to photographies is immediate, Yuki explores the field of photography to provide images that have never been seen. This work has been developed over time – many of her series, like Transvest, Eleventh Finger, Study for « Image à la sauvette » and Muybridge’s Twist, were conceived and performed over several years –, based on concepts and aimed at transforming reality to create a dreamlike reality.
Yuki Onodera is an experimental photographer. She shoots with film only and regularly refers to pioneers in photography: Eadweard Muybridge for studies of motion (that inspired Muybridge’s Twist), William Henry Fox Talbot for photogram (used in Eleventh Finger). Yuki is willing to return to the origins of photography, to start from the beginning to re-invent the medium, but also to raise photography to new horizons. Thus she inserted a glass marble into her camera to disperse the light (in the How to Make a Pearl series) and she created new realities to lead the viewers to expand their imagination (Transvest, Liquid, TV and Insects, Muybridge’s Twist…)
Yuki Onodera is talented and her talent is recognised worldwide. Included in the collections of some of the most prestigious museums (Pompidou Centre in Paris, J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Shanghai Art Museum, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography…), Yuki exhibits her work all over the world; the most recent exhibit at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, confronts her work with those of Auguste Rodin and Eadweard Muybridge. Because Yuki fully masters her field, she can afford to leave some room to unpredictability when performing it – during the shooting or development phases. Like famous musicians from the 19th century (Schubert, Chopin, Liszt…), Yuki conceives and composes each of her series with utmost care, coherence and freedom; simultaneously, through her photographic experiments, she takes the risk of the unforeseen. All this characterises the musical works that are known under the name « impromptus ». Hence the title of Yuki’s exhibition.
It is an honour for Pierre-Yves Caër Gallery, dedicated to Japanese contemporary art, to exhibit Yuki Onodera’s most recent works as well as several of her iconic series as its inaugural exhibition. Yuki, who lives and works in Paris and whose works have a universal dimension, should not be considered as a representative of Japanese photography. Her works nevertheless speak to the elegance, the deepness, the perfection in execution that are common to all Japanese artistic expressions.
Text : Pierre-Yves Caër
Catalogue of solo show, Yuki Onodera, Pierre-Yves Caër Gallery, Paris, 2017.
Muybridge’s Twist, Study for “Image à la sauvette”, ACT, Below Orpheus, I. The Missing Person, Below Orpheus, II. Strange Distance, Look Out the Window, Liquid, TV and Insect, Eleventh Finger, Transvest, 12 Speed, The World Is Not Small–1826