Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Kaz Oshiro at The Armory Show.
Kaz Oshiro turns exhibitions into still life studies by bringing the image of the painting into the three-dimensional space of the gallery. His subjects such as guitar amplifiers, stereo speakers, cabinets, household appliances, and other banal objects are easily perceived to be the actual thing until the viewer moves around the piece to see the exposed wooden stretchers and canvas. Oshiro is a highly skilled and meticulous artist, but his interests in making such work goes beyond mere trompe l’oeil.
In recent years, Kaz Oshiro has been creating compositions based on construction materials such as the I-beam. Simultaneously referring to industrialization, architecture, and Minimalism, the artist complicates the relationship between fabrication and studio practices in conceptual art. Moving beyond the primary structures that come straight from the factory, Oshiro presents depictions of weathered materials at The Armory Show. Some have been marked for construction, others are rusting from exposure, and still others are defaced with graffiti, left out and neglected. Though symmetrically composed and carefully balanced by the artist, they convey an imperfect world.
Kaz Oshiro was born in Okinawa, Japan in 1967 and lives in Los Angeles. He received a Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts from the California State University, Los Angeles. One- person exhibitions of his work have been presented at Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Charles White Elementary School Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2013); Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan (2007); Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, NV (2007); and Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2005). His work has been included in thematic exhibitions such as Space Between, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2015); Visual Deception II: Into the Future, Bunkamura: The Museum, Tokyo Japan (2014); Between Critique and Absorption: Contemporary Art and Consumer Culture, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI (2013); Simulacrum, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, OH (2012); Bruce Connor and the Primal Scene of Punk Rock, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO (2012); Lifelike, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2012); American Exuberance, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2011); New Image Sculpture, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2011); Artist’s Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2010); Less is less, more is more, that’s all, CAPC Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2008); One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2007); Red Eye: Rubell Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2006); THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2005); Nothing Compared to This, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH (2004); and California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2004). His work can be found in the collections of Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Margulies Contemporary Art Collection, Miami, FL; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT; Oakland Museum of California; Peter Norton Family Foundation, Los Angeles; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; and Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom.
