Hideki Inaba January 16th – February 28th Opening Reception: January 15th 6-8 pm +81 Gallery: 167 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10012 Hours: Wednesday – Sunday 12-7pm www.plus81.us The +81 Gallery New York is proud to present Hideki Inaba’s solo exhibition. The exhibition opens with a live installation piece during the reception from 6-8 on January 15th. My career has been the study of mechanical engineering and graphic design. It has also been the creation of personal artwork. In each of these pursuits I have drawn many lines based on things received from others. In this way I continue forward alongside and following the lines. - Hideki Inaba, Artist www.hidekiinaba.com Hideki Inaba’s talent flourished once he began working in editorial design after completing an engineering course. Inaba’s obvious imagination and adaptability towards graphic design led to his creations receiving almost instant international acclaim. His visual ingenuity would only become more apparent in his later work for SAL magazine. Influenced by the modern artists within its pages, Inaba produced a succession of simple yet striking covers that displayed a refined mastery of his trade. In a way this was the awakening of his new senses. Meanwhile, following the footsteps of as photographer Nick Knight and graphic designer Peter Saville when they launched their experimental online art platform SHOWstudio in 2000, there was a wave of nineties designers like Ryan McGinness, Tomoo Gokita as well as graffiti scribes Kaws and WK Interact taking the turn of the new millennium as an opportunity to start fresh as artists. The times were shifting away from commercial design and graffiti to pure artistic production. Inaba also released experimental artwork at his first solo exhibition “NEWLINE” in 2004, which featured pieces that added movement and time to planar typography on monitors. Successive motion granted the potential of new graphics to the text, along with a sense of life created by an expectation of movement in static images. This would mark the turning point where Inaba turned from commercial design to fully immerse himself in conceptual graphic art. He followed up with the GRAPHIC LINE series, which showed a progression into even more detailed aggregations of fine lines. Inaba produced a more complex visual effect by changing his approach and adding a sense of motion to his graphics simply through combining dozens of simple elements. In his next series, Print Line, Inaba focused on capturing moments from the intricately evolving images and depicting them on paper. The act of taking stills of microscopic lines perfected on monitors and printing them on a physical medium proved difficult even with modern printing techniques. Inaba’s artwork is so intricate that in order to properly recreate it on paper, the prints had to be magnified to enormous sizes. Though Inaba never stopped receiving requests for commercial work, what makes him different from others in the field is his ability to repurpose his original art into commercial designs. His projects for shu uemura, agnès b., and Louis Vuitton have all used his unadulterated creativity, and in that sense have been more akin to artistic collaborations than simple commissioned design work. The fact that all of Inaba’s clients utilize his indecipherable fonts and masterful artwork in such collaborations shows how implicitly they trust his merit and skill. Hideki Inaba is an artist who continues to push the boundaries of fluid presentation of innovative line aggregations on paper amidst progressing digital and printing techniques, much in the same spirit as Piet Mondorian’s Composition and the world of lines that Wassily Kandinsky continued to pursue. - Satoru Yamashita, +81 Gallery Founder & Curator Hideki Inaba Tokyo based designer, artist 1971 Born in Japan 1993 Degree in Science and Engineering, Japan 1997 Freelance graphic designer, Tokyo 2004 Founded HIDEKI INABA Design After completing an engineering course, Hideki Inaba started his career as a graphic designer in the late 90′s. He gained highest attention for his innovative graphic works. His first solo exhibition “NEWLINE” was held in 2004. After that, he participated in the exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, 3331 Arts Chiyoda and National Art Gallery Malaysia. His latest solo exhibitions were “9010″ held for the 20th anniversary of Art Gallery Artium and “+81 3331 9010″ at +81 Gallery. His graphic design work was selected for the art division jury recommended work in Japan Media Arts Festival and invited to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, then held an exhibition and gave a lecture there. Hideki Inaba has been created the graphic work for Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo. For additional information please contact: (646) 524-7171 or info@plus81.us