Starting March 29, visit Thinkspace gallery in Los Angeles to see new and recent paintings by Japanese artist Fuco Ueda. Known for her surreal paintings of girls surrounded by hyper-colored flora and fauna, her works are at once shocking and serene. There's always a deliberate juxtaposition happening in her paintings – sweet yet disturbing, calm yet chaotic. As the gallery states, “Beauty lives and thrives in Ueda's surreal universe – a place of unlikely kinships and unsettling recesses – as the artist forges a precarious harmony between light and dark, loneliness and friendship, emptiness and largess.”
This is the artist's first solo exhibition at Thinkspace. You'll see a lot of uses of chrysanthemums in her works – which, in Japanese culture, is known as a symbol of many things including endurance and integrity as well as lamentation and grief. (Also, love her underwater, bubble-filled paintings, as well.)
