TEPPEI KANEUJI, RICHARD PETTIBONE

Known for collages and sculptures made by combining complex images in manifold strata, since 2023 Kaneuji has been engaged in production of the POOOPOPOO series of objects composed of multilayered mishmashes of miscellaneous imagery, fabricated using cutting-edge technology that allows printing on solid objects with uneven surfaces. In these works, myriad visuals flow into the frame, intersect and intertwine; not only images from works by the likes of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp, but photographs, flyers and other printed matter, children’s scribblings, and fragments of personal images.

American artist Richard Pettibone took images from the work of other artists and produced paintings that faithfully duplicated these on a smaller scale. The diminutive proportions of these lookalikes also made them faithful recreations of the images Pettibone saw in art journals. Perhaps miniaturising works by masters of modern art also served to position them within his own real life and experiences. Pettibone’s technique of recreating existing images as paintings and reusing them formed the basis of a trend that in the 1980s became known as appropriation art.

Thus Kaneuji and Pettibone can be said to take a common approach to art-making of reinterpreting and dismantling existing images such as works by past painters, before modifying them through the addition of personal experience, endowing them with a different kind of movement or direction.

This exhibition comprises Pettibone’s black-and-white paintings on the themes of Brancusi and Duchamp, and new works in Kaneuji’s POOOPOPOO series that pay homage to Pettibone’s paintings. Monochrome is the name of the game on this occasion; come see how it plays out in the hands of these two off-beat practitioners.