BIO
Born in Tokyo in 1966, Soichiro Shimizu studied at the School of Visual Arts where he lived and worked in New York before moving to Bangkok. His paintings and engravings explore the duality of opposite aesthetic forces noted to the existence and deterioration of man and nature. He builds up layers through a physical rhythm of amplified motions, emphasizing his condition to affect the current nature of the materials, but at the same time destroying the many layers created. Aligning the residue of his past condition with his current self to uncover what’s beneath, the outcome of what is left is the result of what once existed, revealing what was always there to begin with.
Soichiro Shimizu’s works have been selected for numerous private and public collections such as collections from Sony Headquarters, Tokyo and Sony Plaza, New York, Shu Uemura Cosmetics Company and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries worldwide in New York, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, Seoul, and Bangkok. On the occasion of Soichiro Shimizu’s solo exhibition at Itochu Gallery, Tokyo in 1999 former director of MoMa Los Angeles, Jeffrey Deitch made note of Shimizu’s work “The tension created by the confrontation of opposite aesthetic forces is what gives the work its power. In his subtle way, Shimizu is an expert at stoking this aesthetic terrain by fusing opposing approaches to painting into a single work. He draws
the viewer into his richly layered artistic world.”