Tezukayama Gallery is pleased to present “HOPE”, a solo exhibition by Mariko Noda. Noda was born in 1985 in Saga prefecture and she graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts with a BA in Oil Painting in 2009. Since then, she started her carrier as an artist and has been aiming to use a wide variety of media. Her work is seemingly bright and tender. However, hidden beneath the surface is a dark and sometimes even cruel concept.

In 2012, Noda participated in an art festival in Nara prefecture called “Hanarart”. In this festival she exhibited with young and energetic artists in ‘The former residence of Kawamoto’, an old Japanese house, which also used to be a brothel. One of her installation works “Locked Them in the Glass (2012)” represented the lives of the girls who used to sell themselves in the house in years gone by. Inside dozens of small glass jars Noda put brightly coloured water and sprinkled each one with fish scales. Like beautiful fish that cannot escape from their water captivity, these women were prisoners of that colourful and vulgar world.

In May, this year she also participated in “YOUNG ART TAIPEI”, a contemporary art fair in a hotel in Taiwan. She exhibited her painting series “1+1=0” and “Untitled” in which she minutely repeated meaningless units over and over on canvas in order to create meaning in other ways. In this work one can see Noda’s concept and her spirit with a strong tenacity of purpose shining through the patterns made by the repetition of units to build meaning, shape and composition.

In her new exhibition ‘Hope’, the theme is built on two Japanese words with the same sound to the ear, but with very different meanings. The themes are ‘death (死shi)’ and ‘poem (詩shi)’. Noda always has strong and clear concepts and this exhibition is no exception. In this work she expresses a compilation of her thoughts. She celebrates the wonder and complexities of being human and her hope in the human condition, which is capable of so many awful things but can also possess so much power and strength. She rejects the image of death as painful and sad, and in doing so hopes to create a work that is poetic in nature. In this exhibition, we will display her latest large size painting and installation artwork.

*image (left)
© Mariko Noda