About the Exhibition

Whitestone Gallery Karuizawa is pleased to announce an exhibition by Kiminari Ohata (1980-) “Symphony” in Karuizawa New Art Museum Gallery 3- his first solo show apart from Kansai area.
As a painter based on Kyoto Kiminari Ohata made paintings on his own while studying media technology in various art fields at the Department of Information Design, Kyoto University of the Arts. Upon graduation he went to Vienna in Austria to study Art and obtained in 2010 a master’s degree with his major in Painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
While his works undergoing the following changes in style and technique from concrete to abstract and from oil painting to acrylic, Ohata consistently creates sophisticated views of the world by his expressions of colors with a touch of freshness. The recent series entitled “Colors on canvas” that he works on vigorously consist in drawings of a fragment of memory as an impression in his daily life. While making good use of paint both immediately and practically for the matiere of the canvas he creates universal images simultaneously reminiscent of the mental scenery in viewers.
In this exhibition about 50 pieces including his new works from the “Colors on canvas” are on view. We hope you will enjoy this exhibition on the occasion.


Artist Statement

Things that we see in our everyday life such as plant flowers just in front of the house, a state of heavy rainfalls, crimson clouds at sunset and a scene we see for an instant by the windows of bus, the fragments of all such things I saw are accumulated and stored as happy memories in my mind.
In recent years, I’m making abstract paintings harmonizing physical contrast of the following materials such as, colors, forms and canvas inspired by those fragments of images, bleeding and thickness of paint, its blur and the difference of texture, various ways of handling paints and a layer of attempts.
By naming the works in series “Colors on canvas” I suggest paintings that are focused on a state of paint itself as their composing physical elements. Then I clarify the fact that images viewers see here are the combination of several parts called “paints”.
Thereby that will help viewers to come and go interactively between fragments of the images, construction of the material and beauty of the composition. Here I’ll show them the difference of way of perceiving things through changes of their point of view and the possibility of paintings.

Kiminari OHATA