Hiroka Yamashita creates paintings by combining scenes from daily life and visions in an animistic way, focusing on the spiritual dimension of the natural world. Many of her compositions seem gently surreal.
Read MoreThe artist nurtures scenes by spontaneously applying colours on canvas, allowing human figures and natural forms to emerge over time; in the process, she may cover or transform one thing into another, leaving the initial forms and brushstrokes visible. Via this gesture of intuitive accumulation that lays bare incompatible, abrupt developments, Yamashita's compositions grow into ambiguously structured, morphing entities.
Hiroka Yamashita (born in 1991 in Hyogo, Japan) lives and works in Okayama. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2017 and her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include: 'Fūdo', Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2022); 'project N 84', Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2021); 'Cosmos Remembered', The Club, Tokyo (2021); and 'Evanescent Horizon' (with Naoya Inose), FOMO Art, Taipei (2021). Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions: 'Their private worlds contained the memory of a painting that had shapes as reassuring as the uncanny footage of a sonogram', curated by Sedrick Chisom, Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); 'Dancing in Dark Times', Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021); and 'Daichi Takagi, Lucía Vidales, Hiroka Yamashita', Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2020), among others.
Text courtesy Kiang Malingue
