Featuring: Yoshitaka Azuma, Yoriko Kita, Sakiko Kurita.

A group show of young painters from the Kansai region of Japan. This exhibition is the New York debut for all three artists.

Since his first gallery solo show in Kyoto half-a-year ago, Osaka-based painter Yoshitaka Azuma has become known as a rising outsider artist. His Garden series of paintings are absurdly constructed compositions of faceless animals and people, surrounded by precisely rendered grasses and flowers emerging from darkness – a glamorously chaotic world. Here, Azuma’s disturbing idealism sutures the boundaries between reality and fiction. Likewise, his Her things cannot be understood series focuses on solitary female figures whose corporeal elements are replaced by dismembered imagery. Their faces composed of knotted hands, these girls stand as suggestive metaphors for the artist’s own internal confusion. Overwhelmed by the flood of media information that affects everyday life, it is through the creative process that the artist can realize the feelings inside himself. Indignant, not at the lies, but rather at the alienation promulgated by contemporary media saturation, he disingenuously evokes the tradition of art brut.

Kyoto artist Yoriko Kita can best be described as a painter’s painter. Selecting motifs from masses of snapshot photos, she crops them and determines their structure as paintings, using precise technical processes to obsessively create abstracted realities and intensive color studies. Her recent work, Garden, is an oil painting depicting a school hallway, punctuated by intervals of afternoon light, where a young girl sits silently sketching. Foregrounded above this quotidian scene are bushes of vibrantly colored roses that frame the subject, creating a fantastic reality. Capturing “something spilling from the subtle interval” between girl and flowers, this painting devours reality, making us aware of the almost indistinct boundaries between fiction and fact that exist through fantasy in daily life.

With an outstanding eye for composition, figurative painter Sakiko Kurita creates intimate, unguarded portraits of the people and things that move her. Kurita’s oil painting Shibafune (Grass Boat) shows a friend of hers squatting in a landscape composed of gradations of red, yellow, and green color. Depicted in stop-motion, it appears as though there is another person in the image, but in actuality it is the original girl as she had been posing only moments earlier, reflecting a transient connection between painter and subject recorded in the painting’s aberration. A watercolor, Shrimp and cocktail, is a still-life of fried shrimp sitting on a bar table. This bold composition arouses hunger, expressing the relish Kurita holds towards her medium while conveying as well the excitement lingering in the artifacts of a night out with friends. Genuinely and enthusiastically engaging painting, Kurita’s talent is remarkable. Oversatiated with the past generation of painters’ antagonistic logic and constructivism, she represents a coming generation of artists forging a renewed relationship with the social sphere.