BERLIN.- KÖNIG GALERIE is presenting MELODY, a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Etsu Egami. On view in the Chapel of St. Agnes, the show marks the artist’s first solo presentation in Germany. MELODY features six new, visually complex paintings that contain a series of portraits reduced to broad, translucent brushstrokes.

Egami is known for her color-rich paintings and captivating compositions that bring together the traditions of figurative and Japanese painting into an entirely new kind of aesthetic experience. The six oil-on-canvas works that comprise MELODY make use of a similar palette and gestural approach to the language of portraiture. Departing from the traditional bust format, Egami’s faces seem to float, ethereally, above a swirling context of color and gesture, the image more at home in the shadowy ephemera of the screen than the traditional IRL painting. The effect is one in which each portrait appears in the process of emerging, held tenuously together through fully transparent building blocks of line and color.

The subjects included in this exhibition range from pop icons, like John Lennon and Freddie Mercury, to unnamed heads, as well as Egami’s first full-length group portrait, the eponymously named, MELODY. This sprawling work is a pink, fleshy affair, put together as though Egami took her cues directly from the materiality of the bodies she chose to figure. The amazing frontality and brash nudity of the individual figures in MELODY are reminiscent of Picasso’s pathbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, which radically reduced the illusionistic space of traditional easel painting, much in the way Egami atomizes her corporeal beings into a concentrated grammar of brushwork and tone. Egami, trained in Germany, her native Japan, and China, fuses the European heritage of portraiture with caricature and swift gestural marks that are inspired by non-European traditions.

Egami has emerged as a leading voice in contemporary painting of the third generation of post-WW II Japanese artists, whose playfulness and immediacy have managed to breathe new life into the medium. Collectively, the works in MELODY showcase the artist’s range and breadth of subjects, bringing an established genre into dialogue with a thoroughly digital epoch. Like those performative predecessors in the Gutai movement in the 1950s in Japan, Egami’s emphasis on the act of painting through clearly legible marks offers an open space for viewers to connect in new ways to the delicate composition that makes up the human figure.

Etsu Egami is a representative of the third generation of post-war Japanese contemporary artists, actively involved in Japan, China, the United States, and Europe. She studied at The Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HFG) in Germany and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.

She was recognized as the youngest artist listed in Forbes Asia’s 30 Under 30 for individuals “changing the world.” In 2024, she was the sole artist featured in the APEC Summit Asia Pacific Leaders Under 30.

Growing up in the United States and Europe and now living and working in China and Japan, Egami’s diverse cultural experiences have deeply influenced her work. She perceives language as something that “can only be sensed, not explained,” which inspired her fascination with communication and its authenticity. Her multidisciplinary practice includes voice, video, and drawing, through which she examines human instincts and the essence of interaction.

Egami’s work has been showcased internationally, including exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and WHAT Museum in Tokyo. She participated in the prestigious VOCA exhibition in 2020 and was selected by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs as a “Talented Artist” in 2021, representing the country in New York. In 2023, she received the Best Artist Prize.

Her work is part of major public collections worldwide, including DIOR (France), He Art Museum (Guangdong), WoodOne Museum (Hiroshima), IRIS Art Museum (Suzhou), Garage Art Museum (Moscow), and HUAWEI (Shenzhen), among others.