Exhibitions

KEN NAKAHASHI is pleased to announce Mariko Matsushita’s solo exhibition, All Reflected in the Water, from March 21 (Tuesday) through May 27 (Saturday), 2023. 

Matsushita relentlessly pursues the question “What is human?”, quietly resisting society’s historical oblivion to death, pain, and despair. 

This exhibition features large oil paintings on canvas in recent years as well as a series of work on hand-made canvas, All Reflected in the Water.

The work is of an urgent and visceral nature, projecting the echo of human voices to the viewers.

The complex and haunting images are the reflection on the ever faint and fading voices of our painful collective past and the power itself that is suspended in fields of deceptively light and gentle color.

This observance of both the individual self and humanity overall at first jars the viewer, forcing conversation and confrontation with the pain of our past and present.

This pain is explored until the point of release, before it is then ultimately accepted and the human voice is finally heard.

Mariko Matsushita

Born in Suita City, Osaka Prefecture, Japan, in 1980.

Mariko Matsushita began writing numerous poems as her first form of expression in early childhood, to cope with and comprehend sexual violence.

She decided to pursue art, seeking to explore truth and an “external faucet”.

In 2004, she graduated with a degree in oil painting from the Kyoto City University of Arts. 

While working at a factory, she resumed painting. Her body of work including Margarita 7 won the Grand Prix at the 2nd CAFFA 2016 (Contemporary Art Foundation Artist Award).

The next year, during the residency at the Delfina Foundation in London, she interacted with female artists from India, Peru, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and so forth. She later visited Auschwitz and the Red House in the Philippines among others, where she produced paintings.

In 2020, she publicized In the Honest Word of Love, inspired by Svetlana Alexievich, and in 2021, The Human Voice, including Friday, named after J.M. Coetzee’s book, making an important turning point.  

In 2022, Matsushita conceived and curated a two-person show titled Seimei with Amapola Prada (residing in Lima, Peru).

[Selected Solo Exhibition]

• 2021 The Human Voice, Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo
• 2020 In the Honest Word of Love, GINZA TSUTAYA BOOKS GINZA ATRIUM, Tokyo
• 2020 Anökumene: Land exiled as uninhabitable, KEN NAKAHASHI, Tokyo
• 2018 Silent Resistance to Oblivion, KEN NAKAHASHI, Tokyo
• 2016 IDO, matchbaco, Tokyo

【Exhibition Summary】

• Title: All Reflected in the Water
• Period: March 21(Tue)–April 22(Sat) ／April 25 (Tue)–May 27 (Sat), 2023
• Artist: Mariko Matsushita
• Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 11:00-18:00
• Closed on Sundays & Mondays

PRESS RELEASE – Tuesday, March 7, 2023

HANDOUT 1 – Monday, March 20, 2023

HANDOUT 2 – Tuesday, May 2, 2023

LIST OF WORKS – Wednesday, April 26, 2023