STUDIO: Shimpei Yoshida

Painting is at the heart of the artistic practice of Shimpei Yoshida (*1992 in Nara, Japan; lives and works in Tokyo), one of the most interesting figures on the recent Japanese art scene.

Since his years in Kyoto, where he graduated from the University of Art and Design in 2014, Shimpei has developed a painterly language that visualizes the indefinable in our relationships with people and things. His paintings explore the threshold between figure and abstraction and are characterized by two particular aspects. Firstly, the choice of motifs: the artist repeatedly paints back figures or faces of people he has never met in everyday life and which come from an old, anonymous family photo album.  Secondly, the use of a specific technique that blurs contours and details and transforms the painterly surface into an airy substance. The light, depicted as a filter of memory or as the aura of the people portrayed, plays an essential role and invites the viewer to enter into an intimate conversation with the images.

For the STUDIO exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, Shimpei Yoshida has conceived a site-specific project in which ten oil paintings of different formats enter into a dialog with one another. The juxtaposition of newly created and older works goes beyond the idea of chronology and forms a constellation of figures that evokes presence and absence, proximity and distance, recognition and revelation, appearance and disappearance.

Curator: Dr. Stefano Agresti