Osamu Kobayashi

Hand In Hand

Nov 13th–December 18th, 2021

Reception: December 11th, 4-6 pm

Open Thursday–Sunday by Appointment

For press inquiries and appointments, please contact Pranay Reddy at laartcorepress@yahoo.com or at (310) 598-8867

(Los Angeles, November 13, 2021) LA Artcore is pleased to present Hand in Hand, a solo exhibit of nine paintings on view at LA Artcore’s Little Tokyo’s gallery space by artist Osamu Kobayashi.

Within a culture of information overflow and spectacle manufacturing, it is an exceedingly rarified and radical gesture to remain rooted to the traditions of one’s discipline and map new ground, while also resonating a sense of now­­–or beyond. The artist continually foregrounds these opposing forces across ten oil paintings of varying scale on view at LA Artcore in Downtown Los Angeles through December 18th, 2021.

Kobayashi decidedly works within the confines of the stretched canvas, and self-consciously synthesizes the medium’s historical lineages and movements while implementing on his own exuberant abstract visual lexicon. Functioning as mechanical and conceptual puzzles, the works’ presenting of a bevy of squiggling lines, shapes, and artificially-hued planes belies their painstakingly planned construction and painterly execution. The works are constructed non-hierarchically in relation to canonical art-historical and New York City-specific art movements, and abstractly position the artist’s everyday musings of life in the city, in relation to the medium’s underlying governing logic and rules. The work’s meanings are activated in the works’ ruptures in perception between planned and improvised formal choices. The works aesthetically confront how choices are rendered visible, what systems govern what is seen and what is obscured, and how human interaction and bodies are in continual dialogue with ordered environments. Kobayashi’s works critique the institution of the medium, metaphorically to one’s relationship within layered constructs of time and social space. Through his painting process, Kobayashi elicits a sense of painterly agency in relation to the spaces one inhabits as sources of both tension and vitality.

Osamu Kobayashi (b. 1984) received his BFA in Painting at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, and the New York Studio Program in 2006. Kobayashi has had numerous solo and group exhibits including most recently at AplusB Contemporary Art in Brescia, Italy in 2020 and in 2018 at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, Florida. Kobayashi was awarded residencies at Lepsien Art Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany in 2019 and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in 2017-18. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.