Sho Shibuya
SOLO SHOW WITH UNIT LONDON
The New-York Time as canvas
Unit London presents Sho Shibuya’s first solo show with the gallery on July 25th. The exhibition titled Month explores our perceptions of time through painting as a daily ritual. It includes thirty paintings and one sculpture which also comprises thirty paintings. Using the New York Times as his canvas, the Brooklyn-based artist paints a sunrise on each newspaper’s front cover, preserving the lifecycle of the news, whether devastating or uplifting.
Chronicles of Time
Sho Shibuya is a Japanese artist, graphic, designer, and founder of the creative studio Placeholder living in Brooklyn, New York. His work is primarily concerned with exploring the concept of time and creating a visual, emotional record, and the paintings have been exhibited at the Triennale Milano, at Art Basel Miami Beach in collaboration with Saint Laurent, and the Momu Fashion Museum, among others. The Sunrise from a Small Window series is Shibuya’s most characteristic work, which began as a daily meditation on the contrast between the steady morning sky and the increasingly chaotic news. The paintings in Month are Sho Shibuya’s visual diary from January to May 2023. Drawing inspiration from On Kawara’s practice of capturing time, the artist shows various ways a single day can be perceived: it can feel long, or monumental, or simply unremarkable.
Brushstrokes of Change
Shibuya uses acrylic paint to render the sunrise before finishing the piece with a deacidification spray to prevent the paper from yellowing. Often, he covers the whole front page in gradations of colour. Until the death of George Floyd, Shibuya’s paintings would only depict sunrises. Since then, he sometimes lets his work reveal his emotions about certain news stories. Sometimes, for significant events such as the US election results or the invasion of Ukraine, Sho Shibuya leaves the New York Times’ headline uncovered.
“I am very good at continuing things. The SUNRISE FROM A SMALL WINDOW painting series began as a simple meditation, born out of a feeling of restlessness and an observation of the contrast between the chaos in the news and the natural calm outside my window, and it evolved from there as I continued to paint and explore my emotions and reactions to the news. In this sense, the project is never finished.
The pandemic was the spark that started this series, but it has grown beyond any single theme. It is not about the news or about the sunrise. The series is united by practice, by routine, and by my personal experience. When I describe it as meditative, that is what I mean: it is a method of reflecting on my feelings and sharing them with the world. It is my visual diary, my reaction to the day, captured in color rather than language. I’ve found that painting is the best way for me to communicate my emotions, to interact with the world. And so, I will continue. »
