Naofumi Maruyama

Keteleer Gallery is very pleased to present a solo exhibition by Naofumi Maruyama. Maruyama's first solo exhibition since joining the gallery will consist of an entirely new series of paintings.

 

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.

 

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