Maebashi Galleria Gallery 2 is pleased to present “Memory of Time,” a group exhibition featuring four galleries: Art Office Shiobara, Tomio Koyama Gallery, MAKI Gallery, and rin art association.

Paintings are born from layers of memory and time; the flow of time intersects in various ways within the artist’s memory before being fixed onto the canvas. Why is it that people sometimes feel things from the distant past “as if they were yesterday,” or conversely, feel recent events as if they happened “a long time ago”?

Canvas and paper serve as the substrate for the artist’s memory. Within the fluctuation between the concrete and the abstract, paintings evoke reality and fantasy through repeated cycles of forgetting and rebirth, functioning as realistic metaphors that pull at the viewer’s heartstrings.

For Ellie Omiya—who wears many hats as a painter, author, film director, and copywriter—painting is the visualization of her own feelings. Her work conveys her memories exactly as she felt them at that moment, inviting the viewer to share in that time.

The poodles painted by Susumu Kamijo become increasingly abstracted, as if in inverse proportion to the faculty of memory. Through combinations of various compositions, colors, backgrounds, and patterns, a unique visual language is constructed.

Vik Muniz is known for a series in which he creates paintings using fragile, ephemeral materials found in daily life and then captures them in photographs. What appears on the screen is an accumulation of time, as well as a divergence from it.

In Kae Masudaʼs paintings, a chaos containing various times and memories is inevitably born when she creates shapes and colors that feel right to her. The order that emerges precisely because she accepts that chaos is realistic and provides effective suggestions for living in the modern age.
We hope you enjoy the works of these four artists, who question the concept of time while wandering between the explicit and the latent, awakening the viewer to the real world.