Nishimura Gallery is pleased to present YOKOO Tadanori's solo exhibition "Onsen" from March 11 to April 12.
Since YOKOO Tadanori started his career in the field of graphic design, he also has been active in diverse genre including theatre, cinema and music, and has been always at the cutting edge of the age. In 1981, he declared that he would define himself as a painter, and since then he has been turning himself on canvas. Yokoo’s paintings are usually hard to put in a genre. In his paintings, he spontaneously brings his interests or personal memories of his life and let them narratively coexist on one stage in a surrealistic way. Once they are given each of their own places in a picture, they are sublimed with ambiguous wit with some "kitsch" caricature and metaphor.
Naturally compatible of affable popularity and borderless psychedelia, Yokoo’s works are now recognized internationally, and known as one of the most influential Japanese artist of this time. In recent years, Foundation Cartier, Paris, held his solo exhibition in 2006, and numbers of retrospectives are held in different venues to introduce his diverse career over 40 years. 
This year, from April 19 to June 15 at Setagaya Museum of Art, and from June 27 to August 24 at Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, " Yokoo Tadanori BE ADVENTUROUS" will be held.
This Exhibition "Onsen" includes the newest fifteen paintings of the subject, spa. The series is based on Yokoo's trips to several different spa villages around Japan, and is an ongoing serial project for "5l" Magazine. He basically paints one picture for one village. The drifting nostalgia and retrospective feeling for Japan-in-the-past, which old spa villages originally hold, have been melting together with his life experience in Yokoo's vision, and each perplexingly concludes as a fresh pictorial view.
The work "Kinosaki Fantasy" (2006, 227.3 x 181.8cm) depicts emotional scenery of the river through the city of Kinosaki Onsen with a sky full of stars. "Memorable Theater" (2007, 116.7 x 90.9cm) illustrates Isawa Onsen, mixed with Yokoo's imaginary experience in the past of him riding in the side seat of an ambulance car, in front of MISHIMA Yukio Memorial Hall. The others include “Red Thread” (2006,162.1 x 130.3cm) for Ikaho Onsen, or "Conflict between civilization and culture"（2007, 162.1 x 130.3cm） for Nasu Onsen. Yokoo's vast imagery may take viewers to far distant lanes around the waterscapes of Onsen.