SEIZAN Gallery New York is pleased to announce With Fallen Leaves, featuring seventeen new oil paintings. These works deepen his exploration of the Candy Wrapper series, where mundane encounters become sites of unexpected intensity. The show opens October 31 and will be on view through December 21, 2024.
 

Ikejiri advances his hyperrealistic technique in compelling new directions, transforming ordinary moments through heightened color and meticulous detail. While most works continue his investigation of discarded wrappers within natural and urban landscapes, three new paintings mark a significant departure. These works focus solely on the rendering of the gum wrappers themselves, isolated against monochromatic backgrounds. This concentrated attention reveals the objects' surprising capacity for visual and emotional resonance.
 

Drawing influence from landscape painters like Ivan Shishkin and Edward Hopper, Ikejiri continues to explore quiet corners of contemporary Japan. In Dawn (2024), a discarded snack bag caught in a pink children's bucket becomes something extraordinary - suspended in partially frozen water, the wrapper remains crisp while Ikejiri's subtle technique allows parts of the bucket, handle, and background to melt into morning light. Each painting captures the precise moment where the ordinary tips into something else entirely, creating a tension between the prosaic and the sublime.
 

Ikejiri was born in Hokkaido in 1971, studied painting at the Toyo Institute of Art and Design, and now lives and works in Tokyo. Ikejiri's work has been included in a number of exhibitions in the US and in Japan. His previous solo exhibitions with SEIZAN Gallery New York include Here, There in 2021 and New Paintings in 2023.
 

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