Soshiro Matsubara
Sleeves of Desire 3
Title: Soshiro Matsubara, Sleeves of Desire 3, 2025
Year: 2025
Material: Pencil on paper
Dimensions: framed: 40 x 30 cm
Edition: Unique, with certificate
Price: 1.750 € including frame (museum glass)
In Sleeves of Desire Soshiro Matsubara transformed the Kunstverein into a vibrating interior of (un)fulfilled desire. In the conceptual sketches for the exhibition, bodies emerge in delicate lines—seeking closeness, challenging the gaze, or withdrawing from it. Matsubara’s perspective is a non-European view of European art history, with a particular focus on Vienna around 1900: a period in which desire was articulated in language, theory, and image. His works revolve around the fragile dynamics of interpersonal relationships, around the happiness and tragedy that can lie in obsession, always permeated by longing, yearning, and a vulnerable, shimmering intensity.
Soshiro Matsubara (*1980 in Hokkaido, Japan, lives in Vienna) studied oil painting at Tama Art University in Tokyo and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His installations, ceramics, drawings, and objets trouvés interweave art-historical motifs and events with memories and projections of intimate moments. His work has been shown, among other places, in exhibitions at FRAC Lorraine, Metz (2024), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (2023), and MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2021).