Masakatsu Kondo

1962 Born in Nagoya
1993 Graduated, The Slade School of Fine Art, London
2012 [solo show] Whenever I Am Silent / All Visual Arts (London,U.K.)
2007 [solo show] Bridge, David Risley Gallery (London,U.K.)
2001 Surface / Nederland’s Foto Instituut (Rotterdam,Holland)
1997 John Moores Liverpool Exhibition 20, Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool,U.K.)
1993 Annihilation Victoria Miro Gallery (London,U.K.)

Masakatsu Kondo is fascinated by the many conceptual contradictions rising from dichotomous words such a natural-artificial, abstract-figurative, Western-Oriental, eternal-ephemeral, as well as by the fact that while we perceive the areas between such terms there are no suitable terms with which to describe them. Kondo regards these inexpressible areas as especially captivating artistic subject matter; he sees them as spheres of silence, individually relative but at the same time wholly universal. Towering mountains, verdant forests, fathomless seas – the phrases for these motifs appearing in Kondo’s paintings are generalized by us day by day through our ceaseless linguistic representation of them, but the inherent images themselves are quietly sleeping in those spheres of silence in a space somewhere between words and reality. Kondo feels that they can be regenerated and expressed afresh by borrowing figures and forms that exist around us.