Blessings and Curses of this World

The Buchmann Galerie is pleased to present Gajin Fujita’s first solo exhibition at the gallery for Berlin Art Week. Gajin Fujita (b. 1972 in Los Angeles, USA) plays masterfully with the codes of American popular culture, interweaving them with pictorial elements from the diversity of ethnicities and cultures in a globalized world. Fusing logos of multinational companies with motifs reminiscent of the woodcuts and ukiyo-e paintings of the Edo period and with tribal graffiti tags forming the background for Raphael’s putti, a truly contemporary cosmos of hyper-entanglement opens up. Sophisticated calligraphic language games are also present in the artist’s multiverse. Fujita’s works are the expression and result of a contemporary, multi-layered production of culture and images; in their “all-over”, his pictorial spaces reveal the simultaneity of the extremely contradictory cultural signs of our internationalized reality. Thus, the Californian painter’s consistently popular work is in tune with the times without losing sight of history. Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times has praised Fujita’s painting as “the most important 21st-century iteration of graffiti’s influence on art”. Gajin Fujita’s works are represented in important public collections, including in the United States and Australia: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney; the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena; the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento; the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio; the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita; the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.

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