【25th – 31st MAY 2023】

PRIVATE VIEW: 25th MAY 2023 6pm-8pm

*Contact gallery info@sway-gallery.com for detail.

The chalk art Moeco Matsushita practices is a pictorial art genre said to have originated in butcher shop signboards in Australia. The term originally referred to the drawing of pictures and words in chalk or oil pastels on chalkboards coated with a special kind of paint, though today it is used to describe all art produced on chalkboards irrespective of the materials used.

Matsushita, who says she was often taken to art museums when she was young by her mother, an amateur painter, was first attracted to chalk art around ten years ago. While still pursuing her career in the entertainment business, she happened to see a chalk artist on television.

“It looked really interesting, and made me want to try it myself. After that I found a place where I could learn to do it in Japan and began attending classes. As a result, I got totally absorbed and ended up spending around eight months in 2012-13 living in New York studying singing, English, and art.”

Soon afterwards, in September 2013, she debuted as a chalk artist, showing her own work for the first time at GREENROOM Hawaii. Then, in January 2017, after some three and a half years of steadily applying herself to her art studies, she held her first solo show, “Moeco chalk art 2017: ‘Tsuyaga,” at a gallery in Omotesando, Tokyo. In the short period of three years since then, she has shown work in around twenty locations in Japan as well as in South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia and New York, becoming an artist whose works are sought after by collectors around the world.

According to Matsushita, she mainly works from photos, but rather than tracing the outlines of the subjects from the photos themselves, she draws them more or less in one go without first doing a rough sketch simply by looking at the photos, blending the subtle shades of colour to skillfully recreate the original images. Such works are undoubtedly reproductions. However, in Matsushita’s case, in addition to the accuracy of her spatial perception, which in most people results in some degree of distortion, the texture of the colours, achievable only in chalk art and one of the reasons why it cannot be pigeonholed as mere reproduction, usher the original images into the artist’s own unique pictorial realm.

Today, when innovative painting derived from street art like the work of Basquiat and Banksy is attracting attention, the chalk art of Moeco Matsushita, while still not fully refined, has the potential to become popular in the near future in a way not seen before, just as the recognition afforded to the paintings of van Gogh and the Impressionists, pop art and the above-mentioned street art increased over time. We anticipate her achieving even greater things in the future.

INTERESTING LINK:

OPENING HOURS:
Monday-Friday: 11am-7pm
Saturday: 12pm-6pm
Sunday: Closed
Bank Holiday: Closed

Free entry

Looking forward to seeing you here!