M.Y. Art Prospects Gallery

KOVNO-KOBE (detail), 2010
Two-fold screen; goat, cow, lamb, pig, lizard, cow stomach sting ray, Nile perch,
shark, snake, salmon, alligator chicken foot, duck foot, cayman, beaver tail, seal,
turkey ostrich leg, gold, silver, palladium, copper, 29.5 x 39.5 in.
Photo by Megumi Tomomitsu

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects is pleased to present KOVNO - KOBE, an exhibition of new work by American artist Jonathan Hammer. The exhibition is on view from Thursday, April 22 through Wednesday, May 26, 2010. This is the artist’s seventh solo exhibition in New York and his first with MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects.

For the past two decades, Jonathan Hammer has investigated the concept of narrative through a unique practice that includes such traditional techniques as etching, Japanese screen-making, 16th-century marquetry and the ancient art of bookbinding. From the image-text interplay of his lavish leather-bound tomes that bring together the work of contemporary artists and writers to the theatrical, story-based characters that populate his drawings and etchings to the historiographic corporealism that underpins his exotic animal-skin screens, Hammer mines the complex and sometimes troubling chronicle of our shared past to inform poignant meditations on the human experience.

For KOVNO - KOBE, Hammer finds inspiration in his Lithuanian heritage, taking as his point of departure a little-known cross-cultural event from World War II in which some 2,100 Lithuanian Jews managed to escape the Nazi campaign of genocide by finding an unlikely safe haven in Japan, then an Axis power and German ally.

Just a few months before the Nazi invasion of Lithuania in June of 1941, vice consul for the Japanese Empire Chiune Sugihara (1900-1986) -- in direct opposition to the Japanese government -- issued transit visas to allow the refugees to travel to Japan on their way to settle in other countries. The Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates that around 40,000 descendants of those Jewish refugees are alive today because of the brave actions taken by Sugihara, who in 1984 was named one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Presenting pastels, gouaches and etchings in addition to the exhibition’s eponymous centerpiece -- a twofold screen made from the marquetry of exotic animal skins and precious metals such as gold and palladium -- Hammer contrasts the perspectives of the victims and victimizers of the massacre in Kovno, Lithuania, with those of the witnesses and saviors in Kobe, Japan. These works cast a new light on an extraordinary yet relatively unknown story from World War II.

Related materials (video, books and photographs) documenting this remarkable event will be available in our project room. Many are courtesy of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan.

Jonathan Hammer was born in Chicago in 1960. He graduated from Bard College and studied bookbinding at the London College of Printing with Romilly Saumerez Smith and Monique Lallier. For 20 years, his work has been included in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions around the world and has been the subject of more than 35 solo exhibitions, including Galeria Fucares, Madrid; Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona; S.E. Gallery, Bergen, Norway; Daniel Buchholz Gallery, Cologne; Galerie Neu, Berlin; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco; Paul Morris Gallery, New York; and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, which has mounted five solo shows of his work. His works are included in many private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City; and the Caldic Collection, Rotterdam. Hammer recently completed a cycle of large sculptures in porcelain with the Bernardaud Foundation in Limoges, France. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including the Swiss Arts Council, Zurich; Art Matters, New York; and Miro Foundation, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Hammer lives and works in Barcelona and San Francisco.