Yumiko and Kenro Izu – In Harmony
September 14th - October 19th, 2018
Opening reception and
book signing with the artists
September 14th, 5-7 pm
The history of art, music and literature is filled with passionate love affairs between creative spirits. In understanding relationships for artistic couples, hints may be found in their work. Such is the premise behind this exhibit of Yumiko and Kenro Izu’s photographs, both artists in their own right who continue to influence and support each other.
This exhibition honors their artistic visions as partners in life and art.
Scheinbaum & Russek are proud to present an exhibition of photographs by two world-renowned artists. Known for using large format view cameras and a mastery of the platinum/palladium printing process, each of their distinctive images capture the dramatic lighting, textures and spirituality that manifest in the subjects they photograph.
Yumiko and Kenro work side by side in harmony to lovingly examine details of the natural world giving the viewer a unique, poetic and humanistic perspective.
On exhibit are images from Yumiko’s newest series, Resonance and Icarus, the photographs explore the ephemeral beauty of flowers, nests, and feathers depicting them in various stages of their life cycle.
Everything in this world has its end and nothing remains unchanged. Flowers, petals, stems, pollens and ruins, they vanish out of the darkness slowly with a hint of sorrow, as if anticipating their fate. The flower¹s life is a metaphor that reflects on the fleetingness of human life. Yumiko Izu
Yumiko Izu’s images are beautifully executed in richly intense platinum/palladium prints. More recent additions to the series include pale white images, done using the same process, but which contrast starkly to their darker counterparts, almost as ghostly reflections.
Kenro Izu’s newest imagery focuses on still-life and the natural beauty of the human and plant world. Blending fruit and sculpture, morphing the human form with close-cropped perspectives, and capturing the silent beauty of flowers in space, Kenro continues to reveal his mastery of photography and the platinum printing process.
Kenro’s photographic projects have taken him throughout the world; he has traveled to Egypt, Syria, Jordan, England, Scotland, Mexico, France and Easter Island (Chile). More recently, he has focused on Buddhist and Hindu monuments in South East Asia: Cambodia, Burma, Indonesia, Vietnam and, most recently Bhutan and India. Izu’s work has been exhibited in numerous museums including the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Smithsonian Institution, Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Peabody/Essex Museum, Museum of Photographic Art, Rubin Museum of Art, among others. He has published several books of his work including: Sacred Places, Still Life, Passage to Angkor, and Eternal Light.
Izu has been the recipient of the Catskill Center for Photography Fellowship in 1992, a NEA grant in 1984, the New York Foundation for Arts grant in 1985, the Lou Stouman Award in 1999, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, the Vision Award from the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2005 and a Lucie Award in 2007.
In 1985, after visiting Cambodia to photograph the Angkor Wat, Kenro Izu dreamt of building a free pediatric hospital. He founded a not-for-profit organization, Friends Without A Border, to help children of Cambodia who suffered from a lack of medical facilities and severe poverty. The Angkor Hospital for Children, which opened in 1999 in Siem Reap, Cambodia, is now an official medical education center. In 2016 The Friends opened a children’s hospital in Laos.
Yumiko Izu (b. 1968) studied at the Visual Arts School in her hometown of Osaka, Japan and later moved to the United States, where she obtained her B.A. from the Brooks Institute of Photography in California. In 1998 she relocated to Manhattan, New York and worked in commercial and editorial photography before launching her fine-art career in 2003, using 8×10 and 11×14 large-format cameras and the platinum/palladium printing process. Since 2008 Izu has been producing large-scale pigment prints.
Izu is a recipient of the 2007 Photographers’ Fellowship from the Center for Photography at Woodstock and has held numerous exhibitions in the United States and Japan. Her recent series include “Secret Garden” and “Faraway,” published by Serindia in the monograph Resonance, and “Icarus“, which was debuted in Tokyo and Taipei in October 2017.
A reception and book signing will take place on September 14th. Both Yumiko’s publication Resonance (Serindia Contemporary, 2016), and Kenro’s publication Seduction (Damiani, 2017) will be available.