Sabina Lee Gallery is proud to announce a joint exhibition with artists, Marc Katano and Minoru Ohira.

Marc Katano , born in Tokyo, spent much of his childhood on the U.S. military base in Japan where his father was stationed. English became his first language, and while he could also speak Japanese, he could not read or write it. The words he saw around him looked like abstract forms and he appreciated their elegance as signs conveying meaning, in much the same way that he appreciated the brushwork of his mother’s sumi-e or black ink paintings.

Over the years, Marc Katano has continued to develop his own form of gestural abstraction. His latest work emanates from a minimalist frame of mind. The use of thin paint with its consequential drips gives, at first, the impression of colorful musical painting. Ellipses fill the space, delicately placed to create an impression of movement and speed. However, Katano’s use of pure color as a design element, in places laid on dark and rich along with its own drips, suddenly changes these otherwise dreamy paintings into edgy ones. Still these elements are handled with subtlety and grace.

The artist calls this suite Line Drawings because he has eliminated the solid flat shape of the ellipse. “By leaving out the form and using just the outline the artists’ job is made more difficult. I am dealing with less elements to create more”. Katano makes use of Eastern influence in his Western gestural art to create something uniquely his own.

Minoru Ohira is a California artist of Japanese descent whose work explores nature and the spirit. Born in Niigata, Japan, he studied art in Mexico before settling in Pasadena, California. Demonstrating his Pacific Rim diversity, he looks to nature to build a dialogue of spirituality and balance. His pieces reflect the shapes and themes that commonly speak to us from nature.
Ohira’s body of work is extremely diverse in terms of size, shape and composition. Using shaven strips of wood and slate, Ohira”s oeuvre range from wall pieces thematically centered on movement, direction, and relationships, to giant forms with various appearances of solidity. Ohira prefers that his materials retain their natural quality. The two large sculptures in this exhibition were made while Ohira was artist ? in- residence at the University of Puget Sound in Seattle. He used recycled timbers from the 1938 Victorian sculpture building a t the University, which was demolished
last spring for a new sculpture facility.

Both artists have exhibited internationally. Katano’s work can be found in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art and the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. Hawaii.
Ohira’s works are collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Fine Art, National Gallery of Thailand, in Bangkok, National Museum of Art in Mexico, and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan.

For more information, please contact Sabina Lee at Sabina Lee Gallery.

The gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11am -6 pm