Yoshiyuki Umehara Solo Exhibition ‟bring back”

ARTDYNE is pleased to present Yoshiyuki Umehara’s solo exhibition “bring back” from August 6 (Sat) to August 21 (Sun).

Umehara was born in Gunma Prefecture in 1997, graduated from Tama Art University’s Department of Painting in 2020 with a major in oil painting, and is an up-and-coming young artist currently based in Kanagawa Prefecture. The face that appears on the painting, painted thickly with a painting knife, is eye-catching as a simplified icon, but at the same time it quietly shakes the viewer with its various backgrounds of human pain, sadness, resignation, and malice. The borderlines and layers, which are hardly smooth, directly convey the materiality of the paint, appealing to us with their raw mass.

In this exhibition, more than 10 of his new works and graduation theses will be exhibited. We hope you will take this opportunity to view and appreciate them.

Artist Statement

When I feel restless, I go into the mountains, where there are many signs of life.
Birdsong, animal trails, sounds and smells, plus stones, trees, and river water, all have them.
I find myself concentrating my scattered consciousness and imagining its unseen form.

The presence wraps around the many things I brought in, covering them like a band-aid and giving them shape.

I took it home and painted.

I went back and forth between the canvas and the image.
In this process, I would recall the scene of the mountain and at the same time, I would look at myself.
After repeated painting, the image appeared as an independent object.
The eyes, as simple as symbols, held a lot of information and looked at me again with averted eyes.

There is no escape from the many things I have seen.
And I go outside to look for that presence like a bandage again.

I think that the presence I felt then was inside me from the beginning.

Yoshiyuki Umehara