Growing Pains: Where Street Art and the Gallery Collide
Ai☆Madonna, I Am Not Saying “Give Me Money Because You Feel Sorry For Me,” 2024, acrylic on shaped canvas, 104 x 87.5 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Ai☆Madonna’s solo exhibition at GR Gallery, I Am Not Saying: -Give Me Money Because You Feel Sorry For Me.-, is true to the tradition of Japanese manga illustration, a style typically used to produce comic books, and subsequently, television. Ai☆Madonna inserts this style into the contemporary arts sphere, where she adopts traditional painting techniques with canvas and acrylic paint to create a visual vocabulary that is closely associated with popular manga and anime of the digital age. For an artist whose roots are based in the underground, and often illicit, street art culture, her decision to pursue recognition via a traditional gallery space introduces questions about the artist’s relationship to the role of the gallery.
Born in 1984 in Tokyo, Ai☆Madonna obsessively paints caricatures of young girls as she mourns a desired childhood she feels she never had. Sometimes a reflection of the artist appears in the oversized eyes of a nameless girl, forming an endless and insatiable loop of nostalgia for the artist’s lost girlhood. These compositions often start out digitally, as the style would suggest, in an iPad sketch which is later transposed onto canvas, which the artist fills in with a splashy, playful acrylic color palette.
Ai☆Madonna, Tsuzukimashitti・Diclofenac・Marumi, 2024, acrylic on shaped canvas, 130.5 x 150.6 cm. Courtesy the artist.
Perhaps the most significant component of Ai☆Madonna’s practice is her painting performances, which began on the streets of Akihabara, Tokyo in 2007. The concept of painting as performance certainly has a precedent in the plein-air paintings of the impressionists or even the activation of the body found in Abstract Expressionists. But Ai☆Madonna isn’t interested in a performance that implicates the body; instead, the practice was born from a sort of restlessness she felt from the rigid atmosphere of the white cube. By inserting her work back on the streets, she feels a connection to the people and to her beginnings as a street artist.
Despite her engagement with the contemporary art market, Ai☆Madonna’s work is perhaps best suited for the public and popular mediums with which she still engages. In 2019, Ai☆Madonna published her first manga work, titled Hakua, available on the artist’s website along with other goods such as stickers, t-shirts, and tote bags. In 2021 and 2022, Ai☆Madonna participated in the 180 Art Project, an organization that invites artists to intervene with blank construction site barriers. Ai☆Madonna’s style and sensibility are derived from popular culture and the means of display that traditionally go along with it. That sensibility is weakened when Ai☆Madonna’s imagery is applied to a form that is digestible for the conformist pretensions of gallerists and collectors who have the power to make or break a contemporary artist’s career.
Ai☆Madonna, Can’t Recall Her Face “Ikura on Day 7”, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 194 x 194 cm. Courtesy the artist.
The press release for I Am Not Saying: -Give Me Money Because You Feel Sorry For Me.- emphasizes the artist’s rejection of being commodified and identifies how easily the art market can warp the intentions of artists and their work. While I certainly don’t disagree with the sentiment, I am personally left wanting because of the cognitive dissonance between the works included in the show and the intentions behind them. In a post-internet age when our lives are contextualized by 2D imagery, the viewer is fully capable of deriving meaning and value from popular and accessible mediums. The type of artifice in Ai☆Madonna’s current paintings, which reverses the role of artist and machine, is not necessary beyond their potential to, as the artist herself aptly says, become “colored stocks.” Ai☆Madonna is right to feel suffocated by the white cube, but publicly performing a digital-like application of paint to her compositions stops short of avoiding this dilemma. The rift between the contemporary art market’s definition of “fine art” and the appetites of artists and their common appreciators has become an elephant in the room that must be named and challenged.
Installation view of Ai☆Madonna: I Am Not Saying: -Give Me Money Because You Feel Sorry For Me.- Courtesy of GR Gallery.
Ai☆Madonna: I Am Not Saying: -Give Me Money Because You Feel Sorry For Me.- is on view at GR Gallery between Oct. 10 and Nov. 9, 2024.
