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NORIKO SAKANISHI Congress Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
An established artist with a 35-year career, Noriko Sakanishi is known
for work that combines minimalism and refined elegance with emotional
intensity, mystery, solemnity and the perception of weighted mass.
"Seeking Balance" is what Noriko Sakanishi is doing in the studio when
making art. She is seeking an aesthetic balance which, she states, speaks to
broader questions of nature and spirit. Her work, a combination of painting
and sculpture, presents the challenge of balancing the various elements
of color, texture, three-dimensional form, etc. in a way that works as a whole.
In this exhibit, Noriko Sakanishi has moved away from what she describes
as a balance based on or contained within a particular type of symmetry.
In this new approach the pieces sometimes appear to be in a process of
coming apart or falling down--being out of balance. Upsetting the balance
in this way underscores its precarious and fleeting nature. It also allows
the artist to experiment with a process of reaching balance in a different way.
A recipient of a 2005-2006 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Noriko
Sakanishi has exhibited in significant galleries and institutions in New
England and New York. She resides and maintains a studio in Portland,
Maine. This exhibit marks her 15th year with June Fitzpatrick Gallery.
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review by Philip Isaacson, November 13, 2005
Noriko Sakanishi's art dwells in an indeterminate world, somewhere between painting and sculpture and somewhere between the fastidious shibui of Japan and the approach made by art to industrial America in the 1930s. If the last bit isn't clear, think of Margaret Bourke-White and the repetition of tough industrial forms.
The joining of two aesthetics, one remarkable for its exquisite refinement and the other for its aggressive force, is Sakanishi's achievement. It is a synthesis in tension--the tug between Zen and the erstwhile fist of Bethlehem Steel or Detroit.
I look for the former--the philosophically achieved austerity--but the latter, the references to cast and machined forms, nudges me aside. This contributes animation. The work, despite flawless formal arrangement and a calming palette, is never quite at rest.
Congress Street Gallery
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