Yukie Ishikawa is a Japanese contemporary artist born in Tokyo in 1961. She graduated from Musashino Art University in 1983. She has had several solo shows at Hillside Gallery (Tokyo), Nantenshi Gallery (Tokyo) in1993, and other galleries. She has participated in group shows and exhibitions, including those at the Ueno Royal Museum (Tokyo), the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Sezon Museum (Tokyo), and International Biennial of Water Color Castle of Zaprice, Kamnik, Slovenia. With her successful solo show at Blum & Poe Gallery Tokyo in 2018, how her art develops has come to international attention.
Ishikawa begins creation of a painting by tracing forms she has found in printed materials such as magazines and advertisements. The forms she picked are then enlarged and projected, deviating from the original roles they had, to serve as pictorial elements having totally different meanings.
Ishikawa applied red paint as if to let it seep into the large canvas. Drawing the base first, then finding the source of the picture worthy of the base, and finally facing the canvas again to paint the picture, were the three steps the artist took. The three steps were intermittent and had time gaps between them. The time gaps are Ishikawa’s distinctive characteristic that serve as a lynchpin of the carefully worked composition on the canvas.