Yukimasa Ida
Elephant Magazine

Japanese painter Yukimasa Ida utilises a dense impasto to create large-scale, heavy-duty canvases that tread a fine line between figuration and abstraction. These thick layers of oils take on the qualities of sculpture, while his bronze ‘heads’ also retain marks that resemble the impact of a forceful palette knife. For his inaugural solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago (on display from 26 June to 14 August) Ida presents a new body of work that embraces the idiom “ichi-go ichi-e”, a concept that promotes treasuring the expression and unrepeatable nature of a moment. It is a prescient topic for an artist who his finding his own unique language through the experimental possibilities of his materials, while making nods to their position within the canon of art history.