Gallery Collaborations

Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery opened in 1989 as a gallery showcasing contemporary works of art. It introduces Japanese and overseas artists such as Hiroto Kitagawa, Etsuko Nakatsuji, Robert Kushner, and photographer Toshio Shibata. Through an encounter with the family of the late Jiro Yoshihara, the founder of the Gutai Art Association, the gallery has held solo exhibits by Jiro Yoshihara, Michio Yoshihara, Sadamasa Motonaga, Shozo Shimamoto, and Takesada Matsutani.

Chris Sharp Gallery opened in Los Angeles in January 2021. Founded by writer, curator and co-founder of Lulu, Mexico City, Chris Sharp, the gallery is focused on a mixture of emerging, mid-career and overlooked or historically neglected positions. With a strong core of artists based in LA, the gallery also represents a number of positions on the East Coast, the UK, and Europe.
　
The intention of the program is to present fully-integrated practices which think plastically— in other words, practices in which politics and ideas are indivisible from materials and form. The personal and the idiosyncratic hold a privileged place in the gallery’s aesthetics, while humor (the weirder, the better) and craft are crucial to its quiddity, all of which tends to be conveyed with a certain spatial elegance which seeks to foreground every work of art as the humble miracle that it is.
　
Alternatively, the notion of “wacky mode”, conceived by the writer Donald Barthelme, and transmitted to us by his student Padget Powell could also be said to sum up the gallery’s philosophy:
“We have wacky mode,” Powell remembers Barthelme saying to his class, a writing workshop Powell was taking. “What must wacky mode do?” The students, clueless, stayed quiet. Barthelme said, “Break their hearts.”