Given

Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present TOSHIO SHIBATA and TOEKO TATSUNO: GIVEN, their first joint exhibition in New York. Whereas Shibata’s photographs have been widely exhibited in the US, Tatsuno’s paintings have rarely been seen outside Asia. This exhibition follows their very large two person show last year at the National Arts Center in Tokyo.

Shibata, born 1949, and Tatsuno, born 1950, founded the collective the Cosmos Factory while classmates at the Tokyo University of the Arts. He evolved into photography while she pursued painting and printmaking. Both exhibit a highly abstract vision, and share many formal ideas while pursuing their individual mediums.

Shibata is regarded as the preeminent Japanese contemporary landscape photographer, concentrating on civil engineering projects such as dams, waterfalls, and irrigation sluices. Tatsuno embraces abstract ideas and geometric forms creating lush paintings and one-of-a-kind prints. Hung side by side, a lively conversation develops between photography and painting, realism and abstraction, and together they make us more aware of architectonic forms that surround us but that we rarely give our full attention.

Toshio Shibata & Toeko Tatsuno

April 25 – May 25, 2013

Press Release

Toshio Shibata interviewed in the Guardian

‘Japan was a mess at the time, not a photogenic place at all. So I tried to find beauty in the stuff most people just ignored’