Il Quarto Stato with Motta, Campari, Pirelli Armani, Prada, Chicco, Alitalia and Visa at Piazza Duomo
© 2024 TOMOKO NAGAO
For the cover image of all contributions to the Social Justice 44 symposium, we have kindly been allowed to use an artwork by Tomoko Nagao, a Japanese-born, Milan-based artist whose work we have found while browsing the internet for contemporary visual elaborations on social justice.
Nagao’s work resonates with the spirit of our workshop – playfully but studiously grounded in complex contemporary social realities, well-aware of the tensions between emancipation and consumerism, progress and alienation, freedom and social embedment, identity and belonging. The artwork we chose, in conversation with the author, is the artist’s contemporary rendition of Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo’s 1901 work “Il quarto stato” (The Fourth Estate), currently displayed at the Museo del 900 in Milan, Italy. The original showed workers in a presumptive act of protest (a walk out?), but also intent on marching towards a better future, with a sense of impending progress conveyed by the rarefied aesthetics of the representation. The space for such progress seems almost overtaken by the intensity of consumption and other demands of modern life, with its very tangible symbols, in Nagao’s rendition – how to reclaim it, while maintaining, and expanding, the emancipatory ideals once so aptly (if so deceitfully) expressed by private law liberalism? This is ultimately the question that the workshop will be grappling with.
About the artist
Tomoko Nagao (Nagoya, 1976) lives and works in Milan since 2006.
She was born in Nagoya, graduated from Saga art college in Kyoto and Bsemi Schooling System in Yokohama, then moved to London in 2000 and graduated from Chelsea College Art & Design, MA Fine Art in 2003.
She made her debut in 1998 with a solo exhibition at Yuraku-Bashi Gallery in Tokyo. In 1999 she won the Canon Price in Tokyo with a photographic work. Since 2006 in Italy she has dedicated herself to painting and sculpture, starting a neo-Pop research based on the contamination between East and West that led her to be selected as a young artist at the international exhibition Botticelli Reimagined organised by the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and then at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2016.
Solo exhibitions:
- 2024 Kawaii Art History-Tomoko Nagao’s first exhibition in Taiwan, cycc, Taoyuan
- 2024 Spring party, Galleria Deodato, Milano
- 2020 Icons of art, workshop for “Uniqlo”, Uniqlo store, Milano
- 2020 Women in Pop, 210 Gallery, Galleria VIK Milano, Milano
- 2019 Tomoko Nagao, Triennale di Milano, Palazzo dell’Arte, Milano
- 2019 Shiseido Art Lab, “Shisheido” store, Venezia, Firenze, Roma, Catania, Milano
- 2018 Tomoko Nagao. Iridescent Obsessions, Galleria Deodato, Milano
- 2018 Tomoko Nagao, Galleria Alberto Sordi, Roma
- 2012 Superflat experience di Tomoko Nagao, Galleria Famiglia Margini, Milano
- 2012 Micropop-Kawaizzazione di Tomoko, OMhotel, Olgiate Olona
- 2007 PoP PuPPet, Galleria Famiglia Margini, Milano
- 1999 Castle in the sky, Yamate 234 Gallery, Yokohama
- 1998 Yuraku-Bashi Gallery, Tokyo.
Collective exhibitions:
2024
- Per grazia ricevuta, Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milano
2022
- The red dot, Vôtre Spazi contemporanei, Carrara
- Con me o con nessuno, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino
- Living women, Casa Lago, Milano
2019
- Oh my pop!, Nhow Hotel Milano, Milano
- Girls Girls International Exhibition of Art & Illustration, Taipei City Art Center, Taipei
- Surfashion, Galleria Vik Milano, Milano
2018
- Japan pop in Franciacorta, Franciacorta Outlet Village, Rovato
2017
- Kirakira Contemporary Concept, Galleria Cavour, Bologna
2016
- Monferrato Fluttuante, Castello Paleologo di Casale Monferrato, Casale Monferrato
- Botticelli Reimagined,Victoria and Albert Museum, London UK.
- The last last supper ,Villa Burba, Rho.
2015
- Botticelli Renaissance, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
- Energy box-Urban Art Renaissance, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano
- Premio Pio Alferano 2015, Castello di Castellabate, Castellabate
- M-WAM -making our future, Expo 2015 Milano, Fondazione Triulza, Milano
- M-WAM -Milano World Arts Map, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano
- Asta Adisco, Sotheby’s, Milano
2014
- Brerart 2014, Live painting Giardini di via Montello, Milano
- Popup revolution, Caserma XXIV Maggio-Milano, Milano
- museum-Porto Cervo, Art Gallery, Parma
- Hungry for Art, Superstudiopiu, Milano
2013
- Bentornato Caravaggio 2013, Decima Musa Caravaggio, Caravaggio
- Link art fair HK, Art Basel in Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- Salomè and nipposuggestioni, via Dante, Milano
2011
- Sanrio for smiles exhibition Mi japan 2011, Chiostri dell’Umanitaria, Milano
- New grotesque, Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio, Milano
2009
- Fuwari in Palazzo Reale, Bookshop della mostra Samurai, Palazzo Reale, Milano
1999
- Canon Photo Prize Show, P3 Gallery, Tokyo
- Bsemi Exhibition, Yokohama City Gallery, Yokohama
- Happy go lucky, Sezon Art Program, Tokyo
- Hiroshima Art Works, Haizuka Art Center, Hiroshima
- Canon Photo Prize Show, Gallery Raku, Kyoto