Respirare

Opening: Sunday, December 8
Reception: 6–8 PM
Performances: 8–11 PM

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Respirare, Tokyo-based painter Reina Sugihara’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Sugihara’s enigmatic canvases emerge from a gradual and ritualistic process of tracing, layering, and effacement often enacted over a period of months or years. Her paintings first coalesce around the intuitive selection of a found object, whose essential mystery and perceptual ambiguity become a site of sustained phenomenological investigation. Mediated first through the sieve of embodied consciousness and then through the hand of the artist, these objects are transmuted into luminous deposits of gesso and oil, pigment and binder––emergent and quivering contours whose contingent organicism suggests a self-sustaining reality. Striking in their anachronistic approach to a medium often fraught with its own history, Sugihara’s paintings share affinities with the automatism of the Surrealists, the corporeal tendencies of post-war Japanese and European painting, and the contemplative traditions of religious art, but are, quietly, all their own.

Following the opening reception there will be performances by Shizuo Uchida, Ritsuko Sakata (DJ), and the band RQRQ.