NANA ONISHI

Natura morta

Nana Onishi, Obsession, 2001

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OPENING:  Sabato, 27 September 2003 – H. 6.00 pm

29 September 2003 – 22 December 2003

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Born in Tokyo, she studied painting at the prestigious Kanazawa College of Art, then specializing in photography, contemporary art and installations at the Pratt Institute in New York, where she currently resides. Onishi has participated in both solo exhibitions (” Body / Liquid ”, Language, New York, 2001) and in several group shows such as ” Artists in the Marketplace ” (1997, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York) , ” Reactions ” (2002, Exit Art, New York) and at the Venice Biennale in 2001 in the collective exhibition ” Markers ”.

The Verona exhibition is the result of a particular attachment to Italy on the part of this young artist who in 1993 stayed for a few months in Venice for study reasons.

In her works she revisits some of the more traditional themes linked to Japanese artistic-literary creation, such as the inexorable flow of time, memory, death, elaborated with typically contemporary expressive means, such as photography, abstract painting and multimedia installations. .

” My purpose ” she says is to probe the fluid boundary between beauty and physical decay, between life and death, using organic materials – flowers, butchered meat – in different combinations and chromatic configurations ”. The rich Japanese artistic tradition, which has always celebrated all that is precious but short-lived, influences her work, which always associates beauty with fragility. All the senses must cooperate in the enjoyment of the work and therefore also the sense of smell is stimulated by its installations: the scent of fresh flowers harnesses the memory, makes forgotten or latent images and emotions burst in, empathically penetrates deeply offering these works as metaphors of the sorrow for the loss of the past or the joy of its unexpected and welcome reappearance.

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Nana Onischi, Installation view “Natura morta”, 2003

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