Naofumi Maruyama

Biography

Born in 1964 in Niigata, Japan, Naofumi Maruyama currently lives and works in Tokyo. Since the 1990s, he has been regarded as one of Japan’s most important painters. In his work, he uses a specific technique in which cotton is soaked with water and acrylic paint—a so-called “stain” technique—to create motifs that are so soft and ethereal they seem to dissolve into time and space.

His paintings balance between figuration and abstraction and invite the viewer into an experience where the distinction between subject and object becomes blurred; the viewer is, as it were, absorbed into the work itself. Maruyama’s practice is driven by a profound, rational, and honest search for “the possibilities of spaces that exist only within the painting.”

Since 2000, he has been a professor in the painting department of Musashino Art University. In 2008, he was awarded the Art Prize for Young Artists by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

Selected exhibitions:

NO DATE, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2025; HIRAKU Project Vol.14 Naofumi Maruyama Kicking the Water: Sengokuhara, Pola Museum of Art, Kanagawa, 2023; Kicking the Water, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2022; Lascaux and Weather, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2018; FLOWING, Wooson Gallery, Daegu, 2017; GROUND2: Talking About Paintings, Talking About Seeing, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, Tokyo, 2016; Niigata Creations – Museum in Motion, Niigata City Art Museum, Niigata, 2014; Floating Boat, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Aichi, 2011; Transparent Footsteps, ShugoArts, Tokyo, 2010; the front in the back, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2008; Portrait Session, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 2007; The Elegance of Silence: Contemporary Art from East Asia, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2005; HAPPINESS: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR ART + LIFE, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2003; Taipei Biennial: Great Theatre of the World, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2002; MOT Annual 1999: Modest Radicalism, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 1999; 8th Triennale-India, Lalit Kala Akademi, National Academy of Art, New Delhi, 1994; Solo at Satani Gallery, Tokyo, 1992.