ARATANIURANO is pleased to announce Portraits, an exhibition by Mana Konishi
which will run from February 28 until April 4, 2009. This is her second solo exhibition at the gallery, following 2007’s Nowhere in Particular.

Nowhere in Particular featured the type of work for which Konishi is best known: photo-based landscape painting. This exhibition marks her return, after a ten-year break, to the challenges of portraiture. She was drawn back by what would seem a straightforward question: what, fundamentally, are the differences between recreating a landscape and capturing a personality? By way of response, she has worked steadily over the past year on these fresh, varied renderings of friends, acquaintances and herself.

Konishi has described the motivation behind her work as follows: ‘The fun thing about painting is that every mark you make leads you to the next stage... Narrative is not my intention, but people could “read” my paintings.’ As with her landscape work, Konishi first either takes or finds photographs of her subjects. These give her a general sense of composition and detail. Once she begins working on canvas, the original, photographic image becomes more personal — a selective record of the subject’s style, pose, and expression.