BERLIN.- Contemporary Fine Arts announce their first exhibition with Maki Na Kamura (born in Osaka), titled “début.”
Maki Na Kamura’s supposed landscape paintings feed on viewing other paintings. While many painters begin with sketches, Maki Na Kamura’s preparatory work involves comparative looking at painting. In doing so, she plays the role of art historian, using detailed detective work to reveal references to painters from different epochs, leaving some to categorize her work as conceptual.
In her paintings, Na Kamura synthesizes compositions by artists such as Giorgione, Nicholas Poussin, Puvis de Chavannes, and Jean-François Millet, however, in her own painting process, she is not interested in the motifs and iconography of her predecessors, but rather in their structures, which she can adapt and employ in her paintings. The traces of these supposed art historical references, however, vanish simply by the nature of this approach. Na Kamura’s interest in structure goes hand in hand with a negation, or rather, an obliteration, of inverse depth and surface in representative painting.
“Seen in this way, Maki Na Kamura’s position in the recent and contemporary history of painting is unique,” writes Julia Garimorth in her catalogue essay for Na Kamura’s exhibition in the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum. “The way in which she refers to the art of the past and is gestural, expressive, sensual separates her clearly from conceptual art. On the other hand, her work has nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism or Art Informel […] Her work doesn’t fit into any category of contemporary art. It invokes the past as a means of reaching the future of art.”
Maki Na Kamura studied at the University of Arts Aichi in Japan and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Berlin.
She has had solo exhibitions at the Oldenburger Kunstverein, the Museum Haus Kasuya, and the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum in Hagen. She currently has a solo exhibition at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium, on view until March 4th, 2018.
