NISHIMURA Ryo - 西村 涼 (b. 1993)
drypoint
It is very important for galleries to stay au courant, especially if they are selling contemporary art. Recently, we closed the Tokyo gallery for a day (which we rarely do) to visit the Machida Museum of Graphic Art’s exhibition of newly graduated printmakers. Our mission: go through the show and pick our three favorites. At the end of the allotted time, the six of us regrouped to find that we had all selected the pieces made by Nishimura Ryo, who had just completed his MFA from Kyoto City Arts University.
Born in Kyoto, Nishimura is by far our youngest artist. He is attracted to the medium of drypoint etching, which is usually executed with an etching needle on copper plates. This young artist, mindful of his budget, prefers thick sheets of plexiglass as his matrix, which he then works on with all sorts of power tools to create his lines. He is very lucky since his university allows him to use their ateliers which are incredibly spacious by Japanese standards and permit him to work on a much larger scale than many Japanese artists can.
The very next month I embarked on a series of art fairs, and in short order the curators of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art acquired his pieces. Born in 1993, he is off to a good start!
What impressed me the most when I saw his etchings was the confidence of the tracery of the lines. I would have thought that an artist at the beginning of his career might display more hesitation but Nishimura’s compositions are sophisticated and elegant in their assured simplicity.
