KYOKO IDETSU: What can an ideology do for me?

Press:

Meer, August 24, 2024

Nonaka-Hill is pleased to present Kyoko Idetsu’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition What can an Ideology do for me?, opening Saturday, July 27 from 6 – 8pm. The artist will be present.

The paintings of Kyoko Idetsu emerge from daily life, which is arguably a daisy chain of minor stories. They are inevitably punctuated by more important stories that lodge into our memories and justify our picture frames, our resumes, and our obituaries; but Idetsu prefers to mostly focus on the smaller observed events, elaborating them into paintings with outsized emotional and visual weight. We might call this anecdotal expressionism, a school of painting limited to herself. Or we might describe it as a painting diary, albeit mingling the visual narrative devices of manga, television, and film; which heightens her ability to jump cut and flashback, to move in time and space across the picture plane. This animates her painted anecdotes, infusing them with unique emotional registers that underlie daily domestic life.