Kobe City Museum
This current exhibition now on show at Kobe City Museum from Kunsthaus
Zurich is littered with great paintings from particular epochs of contemporary image making by the likes of Picasso, Henri Matisse and Oskar Kokoschka, then there seems to
be another concept within the show, being intermittent fantastic idiosyncratic artworks constructed by the likes of Alberto Giacometti and Paul Klee just to name a few, making it a really mesmerizing
museum experience, it’s as good as it gets.
But in some ways this Kunsthaus Zurich exhibition does more than be
just a sensorial show, it appears to open up new thinking into uncharted
horizons of painting or any other discipline of studio praxis for that matter because once you
leave the exhibit, then start looking at Hyogo landscape with its urban aesthetics, strange sensations from overlapping cultures start
resonate within ones memories and that's when one might start to see new
aesthetic possibilities.
Exhibitions such as the aforementioned one at Kobe City Museum is a credit to the Museum
Directors, Curators and Art Historians of this country, that such possibilities are being revealed to its audiences in the now.
And in a way visiting Museums in Japan there is an air of
optimism, hope and wonderment for ones praxis, whether one goes to the great museums
of Art in Nara, Osaka, Kyoto or Tokyo its appears to be the same sensation, there is that excitement that one comes away
with from learning something, because the Japanese really do care about
culture.
Whilst walking through the Kunsthaus Zurich there was one painting that really struck my eye after viewing Monet
and it was Henri Matisse's painting titled; Barbizon 1908, the freshness of this painting is
astounding, it’s like it was painted yesterday.
For example; Matisse’s paint traces are altogether somewhat
different to what has gone before within painting histories, through the way he has integrated the
primed canvas with the light cerulean hues seen art at the left hand middle top of the Barbizon 1908 image, for they're interspersed with unpainted canvas and are in slantwise oily traces from right angling downwards
towards the left, they connect with foliage of the tree top that is painted in daring turquoise, cadmium
green short slantwise traces, with a few short viridian, blackish hues that
represent shading.
To the right hand side top of Matisse's Barbizon painting there is an airy array of what might
be seen as lime, yellow, cobalt green oil paint marks going downwards, slantwise, right left and almost vertical at
times, again interspersed with unpainted canvas that creates a great ambiance of a summer's day and these breezy slantwise paint traces cascade
down the painting like the noon days light, in a rapturous array of cobalt greens, distant
pinks and bluish purples, with fresh slightly largish brush marks from right downwards towards left oily traces of light sky horizon blues mixed with turquoise, its wonderful innovative painting, it makes one want to breath
in deeply, its intoxicating landscape image making.
So if you want to go and have wonderful time and search for new
and interesting ideas in art like Picasso did at the Louvre, this exhibition
Kobe city Museum is a good place to start now.
