Ota Fine Arts is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Tomoko Kashiki. The artist is currently living in Kyoto, working towards her PhD at the graduate school of art (painting) at Kyoto City University of Arts.
In Kashiki’s paintings, human figures are sometimes truncated, laid out in limited spaces like rooms and gardens. Their oozing presence is kept on the surface of her works. Her flat, smooth textures and flowing lines bear a strong resemblance to Japanese paintings at first sight. However, all of her paintings are executed using acrylic, and manage to achieve a smooth surface and layer upon layer of color through repetitive painting, sanding down and painting again.
Her characteristic style is reminiscent of Modern paintings or Buddhist paintings from the Heian Period, even Shoen Uemura or Seihou Takeuchi. This influence may have come from Kyoto, where she was born and has been studying.
This exhibition features a total of 9 recent paintings, including her most recent large scale works. These are portraits of two androgynous figures with twisted, intertwined fingers, or supine bodies who seem to have merged into the wooden grain of the floor they lie on. Even though the artist paints ordinary daily scenes, she has succeeded in leaving such a strong, daydream-like impression on viewers through her unique way of expressing space and the details of strangely deformed bodies and fragments.
Kashiki’s new works will also be exhibited at "VOCA 2009 – the Vision of Contemporary Art" at the Ueno Royal Museum from March 15th-30th. She was awarded an incentive prize at VOCA this year.
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