Yoshiyuki Umehara Solo exhibition ”Surface”

ARTDYNE is pleased to present Surface, a solo exhibition by Yoshiyuki Umehara.

Born in Gunma Prefecture in 1997, Umehara graduated from the Department of Painting, Oil Painting Course, Tama Art University in 2020. He is currently based in Tokyo.

Umehara’s work is characterized by the use of a palette knife to apply thick layers of paint, where a palpable sense of gravity coexists with a distinctive sense of color and a deft, light touch. His paintings, in which landscapes and objects are anthropomorphized, carry subtle humor and warmth, and at times a hidden sharpness, awakening memories and stories unique to each viewer.

He investigates the essential questions of painting as a medium through the relationship between the materiality of paint and the support. The layered paint emerges not only as color but as a tactile “surface” imbued with physical thickness. It both conceals the pictorial depth and exposes the raw physical presence of the work.

This exhibition focuses on Umehara’s latest works that center on the traces of paint itself—the accumulation of time. The minute displacements and cracks that arise between the support and the paint lead the viewer’s gaze into the depths of the plane, suggesting that painting is more than a visual representation; it is a point of contact between matter and perception. We invite you to experience the richness and ambiguity that dwell within the “surface” of painting.

Artist Statement

Where I live, and what I see in my daily life, continually reshapes my sense of what is ordinary.

My earlier works bore strong impressions of the rugged rock formations and trees I had long observed in my hometown—textures felt deeply in nature. After moving to Tokyo, however, flat roads, glossy building walls, and other urban landscapes gradually became part of my ordinary, manifesting on the surfaces of my works.

For this new series of eleven works, I conducted research in Nanmoku Village, Gunma Prefecture, and brought those landscapes back with me to Tokyo. I then created the paintings as if overlaying the “city” as a surface upon the “village” within me. In the finished works, my past and present coexist, layered together.

— Yoshiyuki Umehara