Imura Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Kanna Takase, Hoshi ni Tameiki [Sigh at the Stars].

 Born in Osaka in 1994, Kanna Takase has been based in Kyoto since receiving her MFA in Painting from Kyoto City University of Arts in 2020. For her first solo exhibition at Imura Art Gallery, she will show about ten new works.

 Takase’s practice involves taking notes about the occurrences and things that bother her in everyday life, and after putting them into words, creating paintings based on those words. She takes human emotions and inner secrets that cannot be intuited through conventional communications and replaces them with bold and playful animals, plants, and objects that visually step away from the original emotions or secrets to create narratives that are humorous at the same time as being disturbing.

Animalized human figures such as dogs and tigers with fangs and claws frequently appear on her canvases, and human relationships are depicted with non-human motifs such as animals, objects, and plants. The figures sometimes appear side by side and sometimes embrace each other, seeming to support each other. But at the same time, with their sharp claws and beaks, the figures can both inflict and receive injury, resulting in an exquisite sense of distance and relationships that exude a feeling of frustration. The sizes and textures of the motifs that appear on the canvas have been deconstructed and painted independently, and the result is the effective creation of a worldview with a distinctive painterly narrative.

Kanna Takase is interested in the uncontrollable human emotions that vacillate in the course of our interactions with others. She regularly thinks that this cycle of emotions, in which various emotions repeatedly appear and disappear without even being noticed, may be what it means to be alive.

Message from the artist

 There are everyday hurts that are casually dismissed, and even if they are not dramatic tragedies, we certainly feel the pain. In our relationships with other people as we go about our lives, there are words that have gone unsaid, times when we have held our breath, and things that we should have accepted but that instead linger as ill feelings. These unspoken things that occur time and time again in our lives, making us heave a sigh, serve as the main theme of my paintings.

Kanna Takase