Loyal is pleased to present Misaki Kawai’s Wet Shiny Surprise. This is Kawai’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and consists of 15 paintings and three sculptures.

In tandem with the exhibition at Loyal we have the pleasure to announce Misaki Kawai’s first institutional solo presentation in Europe at Malmö Konsthall. In the Malmö Konsthall exhibition Misaki Kawai presents several large scale sculptures and wall-sized murals over 700 sqm.

Misaki Kawai’s works are allusive and oblique yet piercingly clear. Kawai employs a visual rhyme and sophistication that celebrates humanity with a flippant, buoyant optimism. The color is saturated, loud and substantial with volume and line. Kawai’s bright, monumental imagery of, let’s say, pineapple knife fights, mango paradises and peanut crushings, are punctuated by free-floating zig-zags, dots, squiggles and triangles that seem to come blasting through her inky-black and creamy-white, jelly-like barriers of ectoplasmic paint. Her confident line, color and form, embrace mistakes and irregularities with a rich personality and humor. The narratives express the varied emotions of life - apprehension, hope, flirtation, eagerness - with an endearing, empathetic, adolescent quality. Not by pretending everything is alright but by admitting life’s a hard road of cracks and crossroads, Kawai approaches her work like a painterly rendition of an old blues song.

Misaki Kawai (1978 in Kagawa, Japan) grew up in Osaka, Japan and studied at Kyoto College of Art before moving to New York in 2000. She currently lives and works between New York and Tokyo. Kawai has exhibited extensively internationally with solo museum exhibitions at ICA Boston; PS1 MOMA, New York; Tokyo Opera City Gallery, Tokyo; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Other notable exhibitions include Deitch Projects, New York; Valencia Institute of Contemporary Art, Valencia, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan. She is represented by Take Ninagawa in Japan and by Loyal in Europe.

Her first breakout solo exhibition was at Kenny Schacter Contemporary in New York in 2002. Kawai was featured in Roberta Smith’s 2010 article Ten Emerging Artists of the Decade in New York Times. Most recent exhibitions include: Nice Bang, Fumetto, Switzerland (solo 2011), Pencil Exercise at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (solo 2011), Facemaker at Royal T, Los Angeles, curated by Kathy Grayson (2011) and 75 Artists in 75 Years, ICA Boston (upcoming 2011).