Ota Fine Arts is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Tomoko Kashiki,　will start on 13th March.

The artist is currently attending PhD in Graduate School of Art (painting) at Kyoto City University of Arts and lives in Kyoto.

In Kashiki’s paintings, human figures are sometimes fractionated, laid out in the limited space, like a room and garden. Their oozing sense of presence is kept on the surface of her works.

Her flat, smooth texture and flowing lines have a strong resemblance to Japanese paintings at the first sight. However all of her paintings are painted by　acrylic, and managed to achieve smooth surface and layer upon layer of colours through her original process of repeating: painting on canvas, sanding down and painting again.
Her characteristic style is reminiscent of Modern paintings or Buddhist paintings in Heian Period, even Shoen Uemura or Seihou Takeuchi. It can be said that it may have come from Kyoto, where she was born and has been studying.

In this exhibition, total 9 recent paintings, including latest large ones will be exhibited.

The portraits of two epicene persons with entwined twisted fingers or the lying person, whose body is merged into wood grain of floor. Even though the artist paints ordinary daily sceneries, she succeeded to leave such a strong impression like a daydream to viewers through her unique way of expressing space and details of strangely deformed body and fragments. Whether she brings back the old memory or look into unseen future... Hope you enjoy her airy-fairy and condensed world of rich imagination.

Kashiki’s new works will also be exhibited at "VOCA 2009 – the Vision of Contemporary Art" at the Ueno Royal Museum from 15th – 30th March.

She was awarded an incentive prize of VOCA this year.