MANIKA NAGARE

Manika Nagare is an artist who captures the lives of strangers in delicate, abstract colour-field oil paintings. She is driven by a desperate curiosity to understand and depict the “lives of strangers,” and recreates an imaginary narrative of the multifarious relationships of people she sees. Although her on-going works have been paintings, she also creates installations using fabrics and her own drawings.

Nagare’s paintings retain a translucency that creates a sensation of depth and shade - despite the lack of figurative elements to contextualise it. The contrasts and harmony of the colours, as well as the sensuous line demarcating the edges of each colour field and brush stroke, result in an inexhaustible landscape of relationships. This is exemplified in two series from 2010, Bouncing Manner and Gushing Manner in which the paintings contain bold abstract strokes of primary and secondary colours, which are used sparingly to retain textures of both the paint itself, as well as the canvas beneath. The mastery of her technique allows for surprising and visually stunning relationships of colour - some of which are applied unevenly, drip down the canvas, or mix into the adjoining colours, infusing the abstract works with vitality.

Nagare gives her paintings what at-first seem like whimsical titles, such as Minty, Couch, Conscious Lemon, and It Was Dimly Familiar (all from the above-mentioned series). Much like her own artistic process, these titles are not intended to be interpreted literally, but rather to suggest viscerally how we might imagine or what we might feel when confronted with these paintings. “Ever since I was a child,” Nagare says, “I have imagined and used conjecture to construct lives for random people I have come in contact with.” She has now transformed this childhood habit into an entire visual language, and despite the abstract nature of her works, she still uses models in her working process.

More recently, Manika Nagare has deployed her methods and aesthetic to describe landscapes from her own highly personal perspective. The 2013 solo exhibition Visible Edge was realised after visiting the Tohoku region, still recovering from the effects of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. The resulting works include large-scale paintings that—while still abstract—seem innately familiar as landscapes, but without revealing the vantage point and state of mind Nagare was in when she painted them. They have more subdued colours than her previous work and have sometimes jarring contrasts, injecting a sense of mystery, awe, and dread to these sublimely beautiful paintings. “Just like in the Tohoku landscape, when thoughts overlap, the colours grow even deeper” she says. “I want people to not just see what’s on the surface, but to feel what’s underneath.”

Manika Nagare, a graduate from the 1997 graduating class at the Joshibi College of Fine Arts, has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions since starting her artistic career in the year 2000. She received the POLA Art Foundation Grant in 2004 and the 2001 Tokyo Wonder Wall Awards Committee Chairman’s Prize, and took a residency in New York. Nagare has participated in group exhibitions including at VOCA 2000 and VOCA 2006; the Sonpo Japan Museum of Art, Tokyo; The National Art Center, Tokyo; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Li-space, Beijing; and multiple solo exhibitions in around Japan, as well as in New York and Turkey. She also had a painting published on the cover of a Japanese fiction novel. She has held numerous workshops to aid the affected areas after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and her activity in the Tohoku region has resulted in her works being hung around the region, including in a nursing home in Iwate and a hotel in Fukushima.

Text by Ruben van Mansum