GR gallery is pleased to announce The Tame Dog and The Hare, the first solo presentation of Tokyo-based artist, Ai☆Madonna, in the USA. The exhibition features the artist newest series of portraits that derive from her recurring reveries, related to the almost total lack of childhood and adolescence memories. These artworks are the result of a systematic research and a fanciful visualization, of how her girlhood would have been. The show puts together 15 shaped artworks of various sizes, executed with the artist radical signature technique; Ai☆Madonna will complete a large live painting, as part of a performance, during the opening event.
The Tame Dog and The Hare is a gentle praise of freedom dedicated to all artists, progressively implying that creativity should never be tamed and obey to commands, but always unrestricted and able to pursue its goal.
The works presented are the latest evolution of the series Can’t Recall Her Face started in 2010, where Ai☆Madonna painted front portraits of various teenage girls faces in the ethereal attempt to remember and depict her own. The exclusive focus on female personalities and the recurrent presence of the ideogram ‘愛’ (Ai) in the pictures highlight the research of her lost childhood.
In search of understanding how girlhood is presented, Ai☆Madonna looks back to her protagonists hypothetical past by highlighting profound moments of connection and intimacy in the attempt of helping each other bonding in creating a flawless imagery. The vivid Manga influences in the artist style are somehow overturned by the action of cutting out the body of the character, an action considered taboo in this realm, and leaving all the connections just to the expression of the face and the reflections in the eyes. After years of investigating this issue the artist felt like the square canvas boundaries couldn't restrain her ‘girls’ anymore so she decided to start performing on something new and more suitable for her expression by shaping the surfaces around the characters.
