PORTLAND, ORE.- Adams and Ollman announced the opening of Nao Kikuchi's solo exhibition, Spur [ʃpuːɐ̯], her first in the United States. Composed of wall-based ceramic sculptures, the exhibition continues the artist's ongoing investigation into the experience of place and belonging through the language of architecture.
Kikuchi's work emerges from an examination of the ways our built environment reflects shared values, customs, and history, while also holding personal memory. Of particular interest to the artist is the way objects change with human touch and with time, evoking a sense of longing for past moments and forms. Drawing on her experience of life in both her native Japan and her adopted home of Germany, Kikuchi references architectural details of each place—a tile floor, a staircase, the shape of a room, a cluster of windows. In her painterly, hand-built ceramic works, one feels the pull of the distant places and objects they represent, as well as a sense of possibility in the new forms they've become. Together, the works extend the vocabulary of both painting and sculpture, abstraction and representation.
Kikuchi's architectural glyphs—and the interactions among them as installed—suggest spaces that are at once intimate and elusive, inside and out, private and public. The title Spur [ʃpuːɐ̯], a German word meaning trace, lane, or trail, speaks both to the spatial logic of the installation—Kikuchi's ceramics are often arranged in a straight line, tracing a path through the gallery—and to the sculptures as a notational system. As Kikuchi has described it, her practice "is a way of marking my physical presence, as if pinning my footsteps onto a map."
Nao Kikuchi (b. 1988, Tochigi, Japan; lives and works in Karlsruhe, Germany) received her BFA and MFA from Tama Art University, Tokyo, before relocating to Germany, where she undertook further study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, which awarded her the Academy Prize in 2021. Her work has been supported by grants from the Pola Art Foundation and the Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation. Kikuchi has exhibited widely across Europe and Japan, with recent solo presentations at Tatsuro Kishimoto, Tokyo (2025), Galerie Clemens Thimme, Karlsruhe (2025), and Trust, Vienna (2023). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Galerie Crone, Vienna; Kunsthalle Mulhouse; POLA Museum Annex, Tokyo; and Adams and Ollman, Portland, among others. Spur [ʃpuːɐ̯] is her first solo exhibition in the United States.
