Yoko Ikeda & Toshio Shibata

Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present YOKO IKEDA and TOSHIO SHIBATA: TREESCAPES, their first joint exhibition in the United States. With the focus principally on trees, a dozen color photographs by each artist will be on display, each presenting the contrary yet compatible perspectives of these two artists.

While Shibata’s photographs have been exhibited globally for over three decades, Yoko Ikeda is an emerging artist developing a new international following. Both artists grew up in Japan, a country with an ancient appreciation of nature in balance with man. Shibata is regarded as the preeminent Japanese contemporary landscape photographer, concentrating on manmade infrastructure embedded within the landscape. Ikeda takes a more whimsical and intimate approach to nature, allowing the camera’s optics to create unpredictable and playful images. Side by side, a lively conversation develops between these two photographers, of different generations, and their relationship to nature.

Yoko Ikeda is the first recipient of the ALPA AWARD, presented at Photo Basel this past June in recognition of her outstanding photography. In 2016, she won the Higashikawa New Photographer Award, and in 2013 the Philadelphia Museum of Art Purchase Award (from the 86^th Annual International Competition: Photography, at the Print Center, Philadelphia).

Many major museums have featured Shibata’s work in solo shows, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Sprengel Museum in Hanover; the Centre National de Photographie in Paris; and in the U.S. - the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In 2012, there was an expansive two-person show of his work, along with paintings by Toeko Tatsuno, at the National Arts Center in Tokyo. In 2013, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, launched a 16-month-long show of his work. Currently, his work is also on exhibit at the Denver Art Museum in New Territory—Landscape Photography Today.