Ai Campbell | Underneath

Ground Floor Gallery is thrilled to present, "Underneath," a solo exhibition debuting new work by artist Ai Campbell. Born in Osaka, Japan, Campbell is currently based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. She is known for transforming ink, metallic pigment, and her signature black-and-white palette into expressive, intricately-rendered forms loosely informed by nature. For her new exhibition, "Underneath," the artist ventures into new territory by employing wood, spray paint, and Mylar: new materials that have allowed her to experiment and navigate between fluidity and solidity and geometric vs. gestural abstraction.

The work of Ai Campbell religiously employs a monochromatic black and white palette to amplify positive and negative space through contrast. By eliminating the diversity of color, the viewer is compelled to dissect the textures, marks and atmospheric surfaces that define her alluring paintings.

She's been fascinated with detailed monochromatic works since the first time she encountered the landscape drawings of her grandfather, a successful industrial designer. During the war, he spent his spare time drawing the places where he was stationed. The consistent 5 x 7 inch works contained fine details in the vivid contrast of black and white. Since he passed away before she was born, his drawings are her only interaction with him and have taken on a sacred quality, as a result. An obsession with this type of simple yet expressive black and white imagery has become the central theme of her own work. She engages the most basic and organic elements of life to build or extract the most complex: water streaming down on a faded wall, leaves layered on a tree, or even her own tangled hair serve as subjects worthy of exploration.

Ai Campbell was trained in oil painting at the Kyoto College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited in Osaka, Japan, Miami, St. Petersburg, Florida, Barcelona, Spain, London, UK, Vienna, Austria and New York City.