2020

5.02 – 9.02 Peter McDonald Guillaume Bijl Kenichi Ogawa Gino Saccone Art Rotterdam 2020

Gallery Mieke van Schaijk at Art Rotterdam 2020, The introduction of Peter McDonald, Main section Booth #19

The British/Japanese artist Peter McDonald has been a household name in England and Japan for some time now. His work is less well known on the European mainland. At the moment his work can be seen here for the first time in Galerie Mieke van Schaijk in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. The gallery is now proud to present his work at Art Rotterdam.

Peter McDonald (Tokyo, 1973) is the son of a Japanese mother and a British father. He studied at the St. Martins School of Art. He lives and works in London and Tokyo. His brother Roger McDonald is the director of Arts Initiative Tokyo. McDonald received the John Moores Painter Award 2008. Japanese painting influences his compositions. McDonald: “Japanese paintings are not about shadows, but about placing images on top of each other on a flat surface.

Collectors of contemporary painting love his work. For example, the fashion designer and collector Peter Pilotto announced in The Financial Times that he considers McDonald’s paintings one of the favourites in his collection.

Balloon heads
Lisa Takahashi wrote about his work: “Peter McDonald paints multi-coloured visions of our world, inhabited by interpretations of characters we encounter every-day, except in McDonald’s world they have giant balloon heads. The balloon heads are translucent and create sumptuous colour mixes when they interact with other heads, or their environment. McDonald has alluded to this visual device as being a way of ‘suggesting a connectedness between people and their environments’.

It’s a beautiful idea that reflects a Buddhist belief – that every action has a reaction, and so the pursuit of virtue will reap rewards. Indeed McDonald’s reasons for painting are virtuous in themselves; he wants to make works that make people smile and feel happy, and wants as many people as possible to enjoy his work. In 2008 Peter McDonald won the John Moore’s Painting Prize for his work ‘Fontana’, which depicted the Spatialist artist Lucio Fontana (with a balloon head, naturally) slashing one of his egg shaped canvases.”

Anne Berkhof remarks about McDonald’s work: “What a pleasure to paint in colour and form, an ode to avant-garde painters of the twentieth century!”

Guillaume Bijl
In addition to the work of Peter McDonald, Galerie Mieke van Schaijk is showing work by Guillaume Bijl, the legendary Belgian artist who was the first exhibitor at the end of 2019 in Mieke van Schaijk’s new gallery in the Blue Pavilion in Den Bosch. His work includes a showcase full of peculiar dog toys from his installation ‘Dogsalon Daisy’ and a number of doormats that welcome the visitor. It is striking that ready-made objects similar to those in Bijl’s work can now regularly be seen in paintings by young artists as an ironic commentary on the functioning of the consumer society.

There is also work by Kenichi Ogawa and Gino Saccone.