Jean-Claude Wouters
“The Sweetest Embrace of All”
Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto is pleased to announce our exhibition with Jean Claude Wouters “The Sweetest Embrace of All” from February 5th (Fri) until March 13th (Sat). This is his first solo exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery and consists of six new photographic works.
Wouters was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1956 and currently lives and works internationally in New York, Paris, Dubai and Tokyo. Wouters studied drawing from an early age, then Ballet, film and various performing arts. In his career as an artist , he has shown an intense sensitivity to the nature of both the body and the spirit. After studying and dancing with Maurice Béjart in late 70’s, Wouters started to work as a performing artist and as an independent filmmaker, with his work selected for the experimental film section at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981 and receiving the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1992. Selected solo exhibitions include“Portraits & Nudes”, Ariel Meyrowitz Gallery（New York, 2005）, “FACES”, Knott Gallery（Brussels, 2008）,“New Portraits”and “SHADOW OF THE SKY”, The Marunouchi Gallery（Tokyo 2006, 2008）. Wouters has also collaborated with fashion designer Marc Jacobs on a project for Bloomingdale’s（New York,2007）. Most recently, Wouters participated a group exhibition, “Landscapes ”at The Empty Quarter Gallery (Dubai, 2009）.
“The expression of the body is a wild and deep territory to explore, and landscapes are like bodies to me. The body is the expression of the soul. And our souls are mysterious landscapes.”
Jean Claude Wouters
Works in the present exhibition were created by the analog method of photographing and re-photographing repeatedly an “original” or printed image.（In some works, a found image of a landscape was re-photographed from the page of a book after having been scratched (drawn) and painted upon by Wouters.）This unique approach captures daily light present as part of the process during photography and the resulting works gradually develop as more abstract and painterly. Pale images slowly appear and when present activate the imagination and memories of viewers in various ways – sometimes producing an apparently infinitely expanding visual field. With a deep respect for great Masters of paintings, Wouters creates painterly and sensual works using photography as a medium.