Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of the work of the Japanese artist, Shinichi Maruyama.
This latest project, Nudes, is a series of nine elegant and mysterious images of a dancer in motion that contradict the notion of a photograph as a single moment of stopped time. Rather, these images are comprised of thousands of individual frames layered together. Collaborating with the choreographer Jessica Lang, Maruyama has created images of movement and the human figure without a beginning or end. The inspiration comes from Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. A painting which “ended all painting,” Duchamp envisioned a scene enacted over time—a construction of multiple frames of a figure walking down a staircase.
Maruyama’s work has consistently examined form suspended in space and time. Nudes is an evolution from his earlier projects, Kusho, 2006—a series of dynamic collisions of ink and water in mid-air, and Gardens, 2010—surreal landscapes created with paint. Furthermore, Nudes expresses his interest in Zen Buddhism—by combining uninterrupted individual moments, the resulting image as a whole appears to be something different from what actually exists.
Shinichi Maruyama was born in Nagano, Japan in 1968. He has lived and worked in New York since 2003. His work has been exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem; The Crow Collection, Dallas; Carnegie Hall, New York; The Boghossian Foundation, Brussels; and is included in numerous public and private collections worldwide.
