Sho Shibuya: Month

25 Jul-24 Aug 2023

Overview

Sho Shibuya’s first exhibition with Unit London examines our perceptions of time through the use of painting as a daily ritual. Month presents a visual diary of the artist’s work from a period between January and May 2023, featuring thirty paintings and one sculpture also comprising thirty paintings.

Using the New York Times as a canvas, Shibuya paints the image of a sunrise on each newspaper’s front cover. Each of these artworks represents a single day, aiming to demonstrate our varying perceptions of different timeframes; a single day can feel long, or monumental, or it can simply feel unremarkable. Despite the inherently divisive nature of front page news, Month offers the unifying motif of a sunrise to keep our daily lives in perspective. 

Month presents a series of artworks from the “post-COVID” era. With this body of work, Shibuya has selected sunrises from clear days in New York City, examining the process and experience of time. Shibuya has been creating these artworks since April 2020. For him, the tranquil sunrise presented a contrast to the chaos in the news. Cities were in lockdown, but the rise and fall of the sun outside his window persevered as if nothing had changed. In fact, in Shibuya’s eyes, everything seemed quieter and more peaceful than usual. For the artist, these continuing movements of nature helped to reset his mind and encouraged him to appreciate everyday moments. More recently, when New York City was blanketed in thick orange smoke from wildfires in Canada, humankind was offered another reminder not to take the view of the sunrise for granted. For Shibuya, these events reinforced the importance of capturing the sun each morning. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Artists