Next Meeting:
Friday, March 26, 2010, 11am
Guest artist: Kaoru Mansour
Kaoru Mansour is a native of Japan working as a painter in Los Angeles.
Kaoru’s art investigates technical and material processes that lead to continually examined surfaces in her mixed media works and sculptures. Born in Tokyo, she grew up in a small village in Japan where her fascination with plants took hold. Mansour came to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and studied at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design (now Otis College of Art and Design) at the end of that decade. Botanical imagery has figured in her work since that time.
Mansour’s graphic works reflect her native culture as well as her musical inclinations, composing images of plants and vegetation overlaid with graphical and diagrammatic notations. Her pieces range from more abstract paintings on paper to simplified botanical collage elements on panels layered with encaustic. These works make use of transfer, collage, acrylic, ink, and gold leaf.
Her fascination with nature and culture extends to her three-dimensional pieces. These focus on found materials such as string, pins, paint, and lettering built up and assembled onto gourds that somehow take on the appearance of the Los Angeles natural landscape, evoke Japanese pop culture, and even resemble small planets.
Mansour has exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Union Center for the Arts and Andrew Shire Gallery in Los Angeles, and g2 Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her works are held in dozens of private and corporate collections. Her recent group exhibitions include international exchange shows between LA Artcore and its partners, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and Burapha University, Bangkok.
For more information, please see our May 2010 newsletter and see more images at Kaoru’s website.
