NYAB Event - Emi Uchida "Trace"

Emi Uchida "Trace"

Onishi Gallery

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Onishi Gallery presents Emi Uchida in a solo show, Trace. In this exhibition, Uchida presents a new body of art in which she builds on the beautiful colors in her former work by adding charcoal lines on top of her colorful oil paintings. Her paintings use fresh and transparent colors echoing watercolor. Her process of laying lines is a way of finding herself through her paintings, which represent both her body and her soul.

Whether Uchida’s charcoal lines are thick, thin, quick, slow, strong or delicate, each stroke makes her aware of the passage of time and the singularity of each moment. Uchida considers her lines a trace of both herself and time; each line on the canvas is different and is impossible to replicate. When Uchida’s lines are piled on each canvas, they merge into one unified plane.

Emi Uchida was born in Yamanashi, Japan in 1970. She studied at Joshibi Junior College of Art and Design and received her degree in Fine Art in 1991. Until 2004, she worked as a designer in the fashion industry. From a very young age she studied realistic painting techniques with established painter Mineko Ando. In 2005, she began exploring abstraction, working closely with artist Anjin Abe. Her well-received first solo exhibition was in Japan at the Yamanashi Prefecture gallery in 2005. Uchida has since been creating intimate visual spaces within the traditional confines of the rectangle, creating environments both naturalistic and dreamlike.

Uchida’s gorgeous surfaces exhibit a mastery of technique in which Uchida isolates colors from lines and then reunites them. Ultimately, when her lines and colors coexist in balance to make those layers invisible, a whole new space of unparalleled texture and possibility appears.

[Image: Emi Uchida "Trace" (2008) oil and charcoal on canvas, 51 x 51 in.]