Aiko Hachisuka & John Williams: 195 Chrystie St

Opening Reception: September 5, 6 - 8 PM

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to exhibit works by Los Angeles-based Aiko Hachisuka and John Williams, on view at the gallery’s 195 Chrystie Street location from August 29 – September 30, 2018. This first two-person project with the artists presents new wall-based assemblages by Hachisuka and recent paintings by Williams, highlighting their respective, unfettered approaches to material based and chromatically-arduous abstraction. Hachisuka and Williams are innovative and uninhibited colorists, who both move their works to the edges of extreme physicality, intuitively challenging conventions of contained beauty.

For this exhibition, Hachisuka will present three new large-scale wall pieces. These dense, hybrid sculptural works are comprised of silkscreened clothes on a rectangular support, which extends physically into space. From afar they present themselves as allover abstractions, with the crushed patterns of applied paint melding with, and fusing onto the found designs and colors of each stuffed article of clothing. Upon closer view, the individual shirts, pants, sweaters, tracksuits, and jackets become recognizable, and the deliberate stitching and construction emerges, forming a mosh pit of bulging fabric. These elaborate yet rigorous new works by Hachisuka reference both the adorned and stuffed works of Yayoi Kusama, and the foam sculptures and crushed metals of John Chamberlain. 

Representative of his complex painting practice, John Williams will show three new canvases in acrylic and oil. The artist, who also works with photography, performance, and sculpture, concentrates on ideas of perception through material experimentation and the variables of color, gesture, scale and texture. While seemingly haphazard and intuitive at first glance, Williams’s dense compositions result from a complicated process, which involves the study of found objects and detritus, the photography of these materials and their projection and transcription with paint onto canvas. Williams’s abstractions are deliberate orchestrations of gesture, pattern, movement, shape, line and color, which create pictorial illusions just on the brink of collapse.

Aiko Hachisuka was born in Nagoya, Japan and received her MFA from  California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Selected solo and group exhibitions include The Warehouse, Dallas; 11R, New York; Brennan & Griffin, New York; D’Amelio Terras, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Her works are included in the collections of Albright Knox, Buffalo; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Rachofsky Collection, Dallas.

John Williams was born 1975 in Bend, OR and educated at California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles and Ohio University, Athens, OH. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles; Brennan & Griffin, New York; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Calder Foundation, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Gladstone Gallery, New York.