EXHIBITIONS
AI NARIYAMA
jam
Nariyama has presented works featuring images that are neither wholly abstract nor figurative. They arise from her attempt to translate the fresh impressions held in her memory into painting while preserving them as fully as possible. Faced with these ambiguous forms, viewers seek to reconcile them in their minds as recognizable images. In this sense, the viewer takes up and continues Nariyama's creative process, participating in it through the act of looking.
TADASHI UMEMOTO
I'll just conveniently spin it
Umemoto creates paintings based on people, landscapes, and other elements drawn from his immediate surroundings and everyday life. While depicting things that exist in reality, he is concerned not simply with capturing them as they are, but with the sense of dissonance and the inexplicable feelings that emerge through the act of painting.
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GROUP EXHIBITION
PAINTING
LURF GALLERY is pleased to present "PAINTING," a group exhibition featuring Miki Ishiyama, Rio Uchino, Takuma Oue, Narumi Tsubakino, Fu Nagasawa, Kousuke Nishimura, and Eri Fukami.
Painting is not only the act of painting; it also encompasses paint, color, the support, and the very process through which an image comes into being.
Each of the seven artists in this exhibition explores what painting can be in a distinct way:
An attempt to give form to sensations, memories, and the state of mind
TEPPEI MIYAKE
NO SIGNAL
Miyake has long examined the time and history that lie behind our everyday lives through geological and mineral cross-sections inscribed in the land.
In this exhibition, he explores sites where the long duration of nature and human activity overlap, focusing on the coal seams of Iizuka City in Fukuoka Prefecture and the strata of mountain sand in central Chiba Prefecture.
KAZUSA MATSUYAMA
CHROMATIC SILHOUETTES
LURF GALLERY is pleased to present "CHROMATIC SILHOUETTES," a solo exhibition by KAZUSA MATSUYAMA. KAZUSA MATSUYAMA has long worked with motifs drawn from figures and scenes of everyday life, evoking in viewers a wide range of meanings and narratives. In this exhibition—his second solo show at our venue—the contours of the human figure are further abstracted, opening new points of connection with the viewer's own memories and experiences.
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MAKOTO HONDA
Gary Give me
In Honda's works, fleeting emotional tremors and fragments of memory surface quietly as motifs or subtle presences. One may be tempted to read a narrative into them, yet no explicit storyline is presented. Viewers are invited to receive these images—rising from Honda's memories and sensibilities—by overlaying them with their own, encountering each work through a personal context.
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AIKA NAGANO
"Natsudonari" (Summer Draws Near)
Nagano has explored an approach in nihonga that reconsiders the space traditionally treated as "blank"—yohaku—as light, and renders it as the pictorial "ground" of the composition. Beyond the depicted motifs themselves, she delicately brings forth formless presences—air, atmosphere, and subtle tremors of light—layering them as luminous veils that rise on the surface of the painting.
The title of this exhibition, "Summer Next Door," refers to the immediate presence of summer.
GROUP EXHIBITION
IMAGINATION
LURF GALLERY is pleased to present "IMAGINATION," a group exhibition featuring five artists active both in Japan and internationally: Shimpei Arima, Oscar Oiwa, Isshin Tanisaki, Iori Nagashima, and Shimpei Yoshida.The five participating artists all share a common starting point: memory.
The painting that constructs an imaginative story of social and environmental issues from the memory of the self, the imagination that opens from the memory of nature and landscape to the starting point of life, and the time engraved in the annual rings of trees.