LONDON.- Vardaxoglou is presenting the first solo exhibition in London by Japanese artist Kentaro Okumura (b. 2002). The exhibition reveals the artist’s preoccupation with formal qualities – composition, colour and texture – and the delicate abstraction of everyday objects and experiences.

Kentaro Okumura paints what he sees – the people and the places he encounters in his daily life – but manipulates the uncertainty and underdetermination, trading clarity of form for clarity of impression. Whether he brings the viewer before a patch of Scottish coast, a chang’aa brewery in Nairobi, or a scene in Marylebone’s Angel in the Fields pub, Okumura’s visual language grounds the perpetual shift of his own subjectivity on canvas.

Okumura lays his paint like meshwork. This mesh is thick and dry but it is also light; one can watch his brush running out of pigment across the surface. The final layer of paint is draped, not plastered, over itself. It is a fishing net, cast onto a rock until it is crusty with salt: a network of crisp, fraying marks that crisscross each other to reveal an identifiable image.

Growing up between China and Japan, and now based in London, Kentaro Okumura explores a unique network of signs and symbols, used as vessels for thought and emotion. In the artist's search for a complete image, Okumura engages with a historical conversation on using paint to exploit the tension between representation and abstraction.

A series of intimate watercolours on Japanese washi paper are also included in the exhibition.

Kentaro Okumura (b. 2002) grew up in Japan and China and is now based in London. Okumura graduated from Camberwell College of Art, London (2024) and was the youngest artist included in ‘On feeling’, a group exhibition curated by Peter Davies at The Approach, London (2024). Okumura is included in the exhibition ‘Regions’ at Hales, London (2025). In April 2025, Vardaxoglou presents Kentaro Okumura’s first solo exhibition in London. The artist was also included in Nancy Durrant’s article ‘Meet the most exciting young artists in London right now’ for The Evening Standard (2024).