Clara Desire solo exhibition 
"Child Oddity"
 
Date｜July 26th - August 31st, 2024
＊Closed from August 11th to August 19th due to summer holidays
Time｜12:00 - 18:00 / Closed on Mon. Sun. Holiday
at Sho＋1
Free Admission

Sho+1 is proud to present Child Oddity, a solo exhibition by Clara Desire from July 26th – August 31st, 2024. 

Clara Desire is a French artist who follows in the stream of graffiti art.

In this exhibition for the previous time in three years consists of new works of skateboards and collage work using bed sheets along with new and recent works on canvas.

We would like you to fully enjoy the free-spirited expression of Clara Desire and please take this opportunity for your pleasure.

Gallery Statement
One can often discover strange characters to be colorful and pop with fragmentary words in the work of Clara Desire.
She mentions “figures and words are the same alphabet belonging to the same language though the pronunciation is only different, but these words have naturally existed into ourselves.
She often uses keywords such as “universe”, “myth”, and “dream” when talking about her work.
Her unique perspective eliminates boundaries of “the visible and the invisible” and “grown-ups and children”, and moreover vivid colors and lines lurked in there will give us relieved feeling as well as the pleasure of living. 

Message from Artist
＊original text by the artist (grammatically as it is. )

You can see that the photo reflects the child, the childish part in everyone, who hides to play, under a bedsheet, who makes a cabin/hut, to protect himself too from the adult judgement, while playing. The title “ODD” refers to the fact that adults sometimes find children’s games or their behavior or their reactions odd or weird, but finally it is children, pure, who find adults the oddest.
The text and the visual explain this artistic approach, with the art which allows this, because thanks to my painting, the person who looks at it and who appropriates it, can create this approach of reconnection to his childish part and to all the parts misunderstood by the adult he is today and by the adults who surrounded him when he was a child.
Healing him or her.

Artist Profile
Born in La Rochelle, France in 1978
Clara Desire is a French artist who follows in the stream of graffiti art, and has started her career as a painter, especially influenced by Futura 2000 (American artist) who becomes a pioneer of an abstract street artist.  The underlying concept of street artists is strongly influenced by “Automatism”, advocated by Andre Breton who is a founder of manifeste du surrelisme as well as Abstract Expressionism, and Art informel movement are also based upon such principle.  Desire’s art reflects the style of combining her beloved comic characters with free writings of her spontaneous and subliminal languages. Such expression ultimately produces unique view of her world, featuring the method of “Automatism” and the primitivist visual style of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Love for Japan
Desire, a fanatical Japanophile, has lived in Tokyo and loves Japanese anime and manga. She is a bookworm, and in her bookshelf there are two very touched books, which are Takeshi Kitano’s ( Takeshikun, hai !) that is an essay based on Kitano’s childhood memory, and Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s ( Madogiwa no Totto-chan). They are still lined up together with Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Clara Desire