In his characteristically flat, graphic style, Greg Ito paints dreamlike worlds that weave together the familiar symbols of animals, plant life, and the stars to convey stories of love, loss, hope, and tragedy.
Read MoreIto received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2008.
While Ito's paintings on regular and shaped canvases may appear silkscreened or digitally painted at first glance, they are in fact hand-painted with occasional aid from masking tape. Deriving from his paintings, Ito's sculptures are similarly saturated in colour and often feature a neon light element.
Ito frequently draws inspiration from his family history, dating back to his grandparents' meeting at Japanese internment camps during the Second World War. Themes of love and hope in times of violence are some of the recurring themes in his work, as manifest in the artist's juxtaposition of light and dark and motifs that produce contrasting meanings such as the plant life for peace and life and fires for destruction.
A repertoire of motifs recur throughout Ito's paintings and sculptures. Celestial bodies, usually consisting of the red sun or a yellow crescent moon inside a black orb, sometimes appear together in one painting. The goldfish and falling ginkgo leaves reference the artist's ancestry, a fourth-generation American of Japanese heritage, while wildfires or California poppies allude to his home in California.
The window is one of Ito's most prominent motifs. Many of his conventionally rectangular canvases feature a painted window frame, offering a view looking out to the fantastic world or into an equally mysterious interior. Shaped canvases, on the other hand, may resemble circular and arch windows. A row of five arch window-shaped canvases form the painting Motion Picture (2021), which appears to simultaneously describe and outdoor and indoor scene comprising a sunset, a wildfire in the distance, and a small model of the earth with a fire underneath, while ginko leaves and poppies frame the top and bottom of the painting.
In Apparition, Ito's solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, in 2021, butterflies were among the artist's favoured symbols to appear throughout the works. A large butterfly takes the sun and the moon as its eyespots at the centre of Bloom, while its smaller counterpart flutters in the bottom-left corner of Heat Wave that depicts a cloud of fire in the distance (both 2021). Ito also collaborated with a hatchery in South Bay to grow butterfly cocoons in the show, introducing living butterflies to the exhibition that, once fully hatched, would follow lights to fly outside the gallery.
Greg Ito has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Selected solo exhibitions include All You Can Carry, Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2022); Apparition, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2021); Enchantment, Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto (2019); Time Traveler, Public Lands, Sacramento, California (2018); Soothsayer, Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2016); and when you thought it would last forever..., The Popular Workshop, San Francisco (2013).
Selected group exhibitions include Good Company: The Remix, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2021); L.A.: Views, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo (2020); The Flat Files, The Pit, Los Angeles (2020); The Private Collection of Water McBeer, Jeffrey Deith, New York (2018); Time Flies Like A Banana, Johannes Vogt, New York (2015); BAN7, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014).
Greg Ito's website can be found here and Ito's Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2024
