Mushroom

6 layers with textural stacking & split fountain
Rising Museum Board 4ply 1000gsm
Laser cut edges
Edition of 40
Signed & numbered by the artist

Osamu Kobayashi's paintings have a beautiful, sweeping texture in them created by his unique painting style that involves using a dozen or more brushes at once. When we approached him about making a print together, we knew we wanted to highlight this distinctive aspect of his art.

These prints came together over the course of almost two years, as we brainstormed and tested ways to replicate a painting's surface texture through serigraphy.

Kobayashi created an original painting with this project in mind, and we used a high-fidelity 3D scan of the painting's surface in order to create a topographic map of the texture. The texture was divided into four layers, each of which we printed numerous times to build up the ink high enough to create an effect much like the brushstrokes in his original paintings.

This print is highly tactile in nature, and we hope that our collectors will enjoy feeling it as much as they enjoy looking at it.

From the artist:

The mushroom form slowly came into being as I worked through more plantlike shapes in my sketchbook. I immediately connected with it as I was fascinated by fungi and the idea that they exist in their own category between plants and animals. They’re ambiguous entities much like my paintings.  “Mushroom”, the title of the print, of course looks like a mushroom, but it can be interpreted in many other ways, both figuratively and abstract.

Artist Bio:

Osamu Kobayashi (b. 1984, Columbia, SC) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited widely in the US and abroad including solo exhibitions at Underdonk Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), A+B Gallery (Brescia, IT), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, Fl), and LA Artcore (Los Angeles, CA). He has participated in group exhibitions at Dirimart Gallery (Istanbul, TR), Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong, CN), Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Lissone, IT), Albertz Benda (Los Angeles, CA), and the Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, SC).

In 2013, Kobayashi was awarded the Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Purchase Fund from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2021, he was awarded a NYFA Artist Fellowship. His work has been reviewed by Artsy, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic among other publications.

Osamu Kobayashi Website     |     Osamu Kobayashi IG