Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce Gardens, an exhibition of works by the Japanese artist Shinichi Maruyama.

This latest project by Maruyama, a series of twelve images, is a conceptual and visual exploration of the mental as well as physical endurance required in the creation of Japanese Zen gardens. Maruyama writes: “It is said that a Zen garden represents in a three-dimensional space the spirits of high priests who have achieved enlightenment. The Zen garden is the expression of boundless cosmic beauty in a physical environment, created through intense human concentration, labor and repeated action”. For Maruyama, a Zen garden is its own universe, a serene place that empowers the visitor to resist temptation, eliminate negative thought, and sever the continuous stream of inessential information emanating from the outside world.

Drawing a parallel between himself and the Buddhist monks who sedulously maintain the Zen gardens of Japan, Maruyama has obsessively devoted himself to imaging the sculptural shapes and forms of liquid in mid-air. His surreal, chimerical compositions are created by repeatedly throwing tempera paint into the air and photographing the result. He arranges these frozen actions in imagined compositions that defy explanation and logical physics. His fantastically colored images that seem to occur in real space recall the work of painters Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró.

Gardens is an evolution from Maruyama’s earlier project, Kusho, a personal expression of the artist’s experience learning to write Chinese calligraphy as a student. Created in a similar manner, Maruyama photographed sumi ink and water. Maruyama was born in Nagano Japan in 1968. He has lived and worked in New York since 2003. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. A catalog will accompany the exhibition.