Misaki Kawai‘s latest exhibition Outdoor Club, opens at Paul Bright’s Toronto gallery tonight.  The opening is from 7 – 10pm and the exhibition runs through the 24th of January.  Don’t miss it.  Press release after the jump

Paul Bright is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Misaki Kawai. This will be the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Toronto. Kawai’s first solo exhibition was the critically acclaimed “Air Show” at Kenny Schachter Contemporary in New York. Since then, Kawai, has had solo exhibitions at P.S.1 MOMA in New York, the Watari Museum in Tokyo, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, just to list a few. Born to an artistic family in Kawaga, Japan in 1978, she was brought up by a father, who was an engineer and amateur painter, alongside a mother, who made clothing and puppets. Kawai was raised in Osaka and studied at the Kyoto College of Art.

Kawai is an artist with the rare ability to harness the ambitious creative energies usually found within the first few years of artistic development. Praise for her efforts can be seen not only in favorable reviews, such as publications like The New York Times, but also in the stack of letters from bewildered children, who saw her Space House exhibition at Boston’s ICA. By combining a sense of innocence and fun with an adult’s cultural awareness, Kawai marks her presence in the contemporary art world.

In recent years, Kawai has focused mainly on painting large-scale canvasses, which are used to depict her uniquely Japanese view of American bravado and exuberance. Hunters, surfers, actions heroes and their animal counterparts, all float through highly worked, almost AB-EX fields of color. As a native of Osaka, otherwise known as the “soul” of Japan as it produces the majority of Japan’s comedians, Kawai also uses humor as a major theme in her work.

For this exhibition, Misaki Kawai has created both installation pieces and large scale paintings. In this show, titled Outdoor Club, her subject matter includes imagery from sporting activities and the wilderness. In one painting, a plane, which is holding a snake hostage, flies through a forest of evergreen trees, with postcard-esque images of downhill skiers and tobogganers lining the backdrop. Misaki invites the viewer to participate in her fantasy world, where man and animal are best friends and where soldiers use pencil crayons as their ammunition.