Minimalissimo

Shadow Art

art & illustration

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Japanese artist Kumi Yamashita (1968) is known for creating realistic imagery from invisible sources. Her shadow art has earned Yamashita international recognition with works appearing in such venues as Seattle Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, Yerba Buena Centre, San Francisco, the Esplanade in Singapore, Hillside Gallery in Tokyo and the Kent Gallery in New York. The pieces are comprised of ordinary everyday things and a single light source, which brings these objects to life. Alphabets and building blocks, scattered across the wall, become realistic human figures, coloured resin plates give shape to facial silhouettes, and credit card imprints create portraits.

Yamashita's precision is staggering. It is amazing to see how these sophisticated, coherent and very detailed images have been originated. These works are exhaustively complex in execution and yet manage to remain simple and minimal to the eye.

Kumi Yamashita will be having solo exhibitions at the Sato Museum, Tokyo and the Dillon Gallery, New York in 2012.

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