Tokyo Gendai: Sophie Barber
Pacifico Yokohama, Stand H04
4 July – 7 June 2024
Sophie Barber, Cherry blossom at Koganei, 2024 © Sophie Barber
For our inaugural participation at Tokyo Gendai, Alison Jacques will be presenting a solo stand of new work by British artist Sophie Barber (b.1996, Hastings, UK).
Sophie Barber’s work celebrates and plays with her identity as a self-proclaimed ‘cultural tourist’, often engaging with aspects of art history and cultural production. By mobilising figures of art historical interest as the subjects of her paintings, Barber develops fictions and fantasies around these individuals, in turn disrupting the established narratives and mythologies that surround them. This is always executed with an enigmatic, homage-like quality that exists in a space between satirical critique and adulation.
Barber’s new paintings call on symbols significant to Japan, while simultaneously referencing Western art historical narratives. The artist fictionally situates Damien Hirst’s cherry blossom paintings in Koganei park, a location famed for its real cherry blossom trees, playfully reducing Hirst’s sprawling blooms to a few intentionally slipshod marks. She also references Claes Oldenburg’s Saw Sawing (1996), a monumental installation which currently resides outside the Tokyo International Exhibition Center. Barber minimises the size of this colossal sculpture and renders it in a deliberately one dimensional, cartoonish fashion.
Other works respond directly to Japan’s rich cultural legacy and folk tales, relying on the ambiguous nature of myths to infuse her work with a sense of uncertain fiction (‘little fibs’, as the artist describes). Barber includes references to snails, crabs, worms and frogs, adorning her canvases with hand-carved wooden and terracotta miniatures of these creatures in a reference to their mythic importance to Japan.