Noriko and Ushio Shinohara

Love is a Roar-r-r!

May 2nd through July 11th, 2015

Boxing Painting Performance: Friday, May 1st, 6:30 pm

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2nd, 6:00 to 8:00 pm

Deborah Colton Gallery is pleased to present Love is a Roar-r-r!, an exhibition by internationally-known artists Noriko and Ushio Shinohara, featured subjects of the Academy Award nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer, which explores the history of the couple’s often tumultuous marriage and their lives as artists. The exhibition will open on Saturday, May 2nd 2915, with a reception for the artists from 6:00 until 8:00 pm, and will run through June 27th, 2015.

Born in Tokyo in 1932, Ushio Shinohara (nicknamed “Gyu-chan”), is a Japanese Neo-Dadaist artist who has lived and worked in the United States since 1969. His parents, a tanka poet and Japanese painter, instilled in him a love for artists such as Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Known for his boxing paintings, which are artifacts of his performances, Ushio works in several mediums including painting, printmaking, drawing and sculpture.

Ushio’s bright and frequently oversized work has exhibited at prestigious institutions internationally, including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art; Centre Georges Pompidou; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Japan Society, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pusan; and soon at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Tate Modern, among others. His work is currently included in International Pop, a landmark exhibition at the Walker Art Center that chronicles the global emergence of Pop art from the 1950s through the early 1970. A recent New York Times article on the exhibition mentions Shinohara: “Ushio Shinohara… engaged in a practice that might have been called punk if the concept had existed then…”

The New York Times: When the World Went Pop

Noriko Shinohara was born in 1953 in Takaoka City, Japan, moved to New York in 1972 to study art, and soon met Ushio in 1973. She has worked as an artist for many years, but the work she is best known for is her Cutie and Bullie series that began in 2006. This series includes drawings, paintings, and prints that feature her characters Cutie and Bullie and are based on herself and Ushio. All of the Cutie and Bullie works are truthful to the point of discomfort and follow Cutie’s early trials of being married to an alcoholic older man and the difficulty of being an artist in New York. The scenes inspired by recent events show Cutie’s triumphs as her work and worth are finally being realized, by both herself and the outside world. Noriko’s work has been exhibited frequently in New York and Japan, and is part of the permanent collections of the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College.

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists worldwide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance, conceptual future media and public space installations. The gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artists to make positive change.