Masanori Tomita at Chris Sharp Gallery

Artist: Masanori Tomita

Exhibition title: Manner

Venue: Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, US

Date: April 20 – May 25, 2024

Photography: ©Ruben Diaz / all images courtesy of the artist and Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present the US solo debut of the Tokyo-based, Japanese painter, Masanori Tomita.
Known for his abstract paintings which consist of densely-layered surfaces and opulent accretions of imagery, Tomita’s work is intimately connected to the intense materiality of Japanese postwar art while forging new ground for contemporary abstraction. The paintings are often crafted with resin, oil, and ink, the aggregate of which is liable to invest the surfaces with a textured and coruscating bijou-like quality. Variously stark, atmospheric, and saturnine, they can read, at times, like some kind of toxic urban excrescence, and at others, like the improbable synthesis of Gustave Moreau, Alberto Burri and manga.

For his exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, Tomita presents a series of all new works. A selection of darker works are complemented by brighter, quasi monochromes. In one painting, buoy, a florescent green seems to sweat through the mottled surface of a beige ground, while in another, mallet, an uneven flesh-toned plane is dappled with specks of yellow and orange. In red bean, a gray ground is meticulously stippled with a red overpainting, which reads like bark, or some kind of reptilian tegument.

Masanori Tomita (b. 1989, Kumamoto, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. Masanori has had solo exhibitions at “Lamella,” High Arts, Paris, 2023; “Usen,” KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, 2022; “Snail Traces,” KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, 2018; “quiz,” KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, 2016; and “mtz2,” Turner Gallery, Tokyo, 2012. His work has been included in recent group shows at “Le Biscuit á Soupe,” High Art, Arles, 2022; “La Constituante,” Parliament, Paris, 2021; “In their shoes 1,” KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, 2021; “Emerging Japanese Painters,” SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery, Hong Kong, 2021; “Studio Exhibition,” Ono Satoshi Open Studio, Yamanashi, 2018; “Hikarie Contemporary Art Eye vol. 9 supervised by Tomio Koyama -through the glasses,” Shibuya Hikarie, Tokyo, 2018; “Inner Flash,” Space Wunderkammer, Tokyo, 2014; “SLASH/square,” gallery5, Tokyo, 2014; “Tomita Masanobu/Nakazono Koji,” Turner Gallery, Tokyo, 2012; “TURNER MUSEUM vol. 1,” Turner Gallery, Tokyo, 2012; “Foo-bar,” TURNER GALLERY, Tokyo, 2011; “hime no tabide,” Gallery ANNEX, Tokyo, 2011; “Sumidagawa River new sight story,” Higashi Honganji Temple, Tokyo, 2010; “The Gunma Biennale for Young Artist 2010,” The Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, 2010; and “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2009,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2009.