Inoue Minoru was born in 1970.

He entered the painting department of Tokyo Zokei University, but dropped out after one year. He went to France to study painting.
However, he returned to Japan after being struck by the fact that the cutting edge of art in Europe at that time was conceptual installations that strongly appealed to the visual sense, such as those by Damien Hirst and Hans Haake, and that the mainstream expression was far removed from Inoue's goal of "painting with a brush on a canvas.
Inoue, who had been working to master painting expression using oil paint and canvas, was delighted to learn that "New Painting "* was attracting attention in Japan upon his return to Japan.
He was delighted to learn that he could paint. His solo exhibition of several large paintings on No. 150 canvases, however, was not satisfactory to Inoue.
He challenged himself to place a "concept" at the core of his work, but he did not know what concept to use, so he decided to limit the number of colors in his paintings.

However, these works, which he says "were not satisfactory," have something in common with his later paintings, and are considered to have played an important role in the process of gradually acquiring his own style of painting.

 

Later, he published cutouts of white squares of paper, cut and re-cut back into squares, which were well received by art critics, but his desire to paint instead of cutouts led him to replace the foliage of the ornamental plants he had expressed in his cutouts with canvas and paint.
Although he was relieved to return to painting, he was unable to bridge the gap between what he wanted to do and the assumption that "contemporary art must be this way" and the fact that he had taken the art school entrance exam and left without being able to technically use oil paints.
However, he felt that the year 2000 marked the end of an era, and he decided to quit "being a contemporary artist," which had become a kind of half-obsession, and to paint what he wanted to paint, the way he wanted to paint it.

 

His work since then has become one in which he thoroughly eliminates the artifice of "making pictures," even though he finds challenges in the process of creation and works diligently to overcome them.
He paints only the act of "painting" the roadside grass and weeds that he has snapped pictures of, and he does not make any corrections or adjustments to the overall image.
His paintings created in this way have an unobtrusive impression but an unobtainable core strength.
In these days when there is so much discussion about de-anthropocentrism and post-humanocene art, it is interesting and even exciting to see how Inoue has somehow found his way into "contemporary art," which he had tried so hard, only to be pushed back and eventually abandoned.

 

This exhibition will feature a selection of Minoru Inoue's work currently on view on the WallsTokyo website.
We hope you will take this opportunity to visit the gallery.

 

*New Paintings
A style of art that flourished in the U.S., Germany, France, and other countries from the late 1970s through the 1980s.
It emerged as a reaction against the esoteric Conceptual Art and Minimal Art, and is characterized by its narrative nature, such as mythology and history, figurative expression of figures, and emotional expression through rough brushstrokes.