Hanshin Umeda gives its top-floor gallery over to Charles Fazzino's 3D pop art for a week
Hanshin Umeda is giving its eighth-floor gallery to a week of Charles Fazzino's 3D pop art, priced up to just over ¥1 million a piece — a small, recurring tool the store uses to pull footfall onto a non-selling floor between its bigger seasonal fairs.
Hankyu Hanshin Department Stores said its Hanshin Umeda main store will give its eighth-floor art gallery over to a one-week exhibition of work by 3D pop artist Charles Fazzino, running October 7 to 13 (the final day closing at 5pm), according to a release dated October 6. The New York-born artist, who has spent five decades developing a layered printmaking technique and has worked with Disney, Universal Studios, Warner Bros and Major League Baseball, is showing four pieces for sale, priced from ¥242,000 to ¥1,045,000, including a ¥1,045,000 work titled World for Us and a Los Angeles Dodgers-themed piece.
The works are built by hand-stacking multiple separately cut woodblock prints with silicone, then finishing them with glitter and Swarovski crystals for depth, the company said, describing Fazzino's signature technique.
A free top-floor gallery show carries little weight on its own, but it is one of the small, recurring tools a department store like Hanshin Umeda uses to keep footfall moving onto non-selling floors between the bigger seasonal fairs — the basement food events and fashion pushes — that actually drive the store's numbers. A one-week run with nothing else competing for the calendar this month also doubles as a low-cost way to sell a handful of high-priced collectible pieces to the store's existing clientele, without taking space from the autumn fashion floors.