Catharine Clark Gallery

Catharine Clark Gallery is pleased to present the solo exhibition by Masami Teraoka: The  Last Supper/The Inversion of the Sacred. Presented in the Media Room is Chris Doyle’s  Apocalypse Management (telling about being one being living). The exhibition dates are  October 2 – November 13, 2010. Mr. Teraoka will be present for the opening reception on  Saturday, October 2, 5–7 pm.

Masami Teraoka first attracted attention with his early work—watercolor paintings that fused  traditional images in the style of Japanese, Edo, wood block prints with popular icons from  contemporary, American, corporate culture. These works explored the collision of two  contrasting cultures, as in the series McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan. In the early  1990’s Teraoka embarked in a new direction, and began to paint multi-frame panels in the  style of western, Medieval, religious triptychs. The stylistic transformation acted as a tool with  which Teraoka was able to more evocatively explore his new thematic preoccupation.  Always working with a subtle political agenda, he delved into contemporary societal issues  relating to the Catholic Church. In the current exhibition, The Last Supper/The Inversion of  the Sacred, the artist continues to engage with these topics. His new series, The Last  Supper, uses the conventional scene of Christ’s betrayal, to symbolize a new scene of  betrayal. Teraoka sees the  Catholic Church as being at a crossroads at which due to sexual  abuse scandals widely publicized by the media, there is an overt contradiction between the  Church’s stated belief and actions. Due to the nature of technological advances in  communication, the Church has been unable to curb the media’s damaging focus upon the  untoward activities of the clergy. In violent scenes, the artist vividly brings these  contradictions, and the aforementioned betrayal of values, to life, with highly sexualized  female figures that cavort with a variety of demonic creatures, leered at, or perhaps joined by  the clergy. Teraoka was further inspired to explore the theme of hypocrisy by news of a dinner hosted by the Catholic Church to which Obama and McCain were invited while running for president.

The current exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery will present triptychs from The Last  Supper/The Inversion of the Sacred, as well as a select group of works on paper from 1969 to 2007 that provide context for the development of Teraoka’s themes across the more than 40  years of his career.

Currently a resident of Hawaii, Masami Teraoka was born in 1936 in Onomichi, Japan, and  first received his BA in Aesthetics from Kwansei Gakuin University, Kobe, Japan. He moved  to Los Angeles in his twenties, where he received his BFA and MFA at the Otis Art Institute.  The subject of a traveling solo exhibition, Masami Teraoka: Drawings and New Paintings,  organized by the Honolulu Academy of Art for travel beginning in 2012, Teraoka has been  widely exhibited and reviewed internationally, with solo shows at institutions such as the  Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian, and the Asian Art Museum in San  Francisco. His work is owned by numerous public collections such as the Los Angeles  County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Tate Modern in  London. He has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 1997.