OSHIMA Kozue Exhibition "pictorial book"（TOKYO）

Oshima was born in 1978, earned BA in Design from Tokyo Zokei University in 2002, and started her career as an artist in 2004. She had had solo exhibition at Gallery ES in 2005 and 2007, and had participated in ‘KISHO KUROKAWA: From the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life,’ at The National Art Center, Tokyo in 2007, ‘Eyes and Curiosity’ at Mizuma Action in 2008. ‘pictorial book’ is a long-awaited solo exhibition with us. Her spectacular work painted by acrylic and fine brushed on gesso is in constant evolution.

The motifs Oshima depicts are from nature such as timber, flower, insect, bird and ocean, and sometimes she paints imagined scenery mixed with circus, train and flag. The artist was inspired by her childhood memories; hugging the moss to find micro-forest in there, landscape she saw during a trip, and skies in her daily life, as well as by various old pictorial books. She grows plants in her garden, and even keeps butterfly larval and let the pupas emerged to observe their biology and to do rigorous sketches over and over. As just described, her work is based on her obsession and pursuance to the motifs and when mixed with her spontaneous imagination, the work starts telling the stories.

Her first solo exhibition at Mizuma Action is entitled ‘pictorial book,’ the source of her imagination, and it consists of seven to eight paintings, some are large and some are small. For Oshima who lives in urban area, it is far more likely to encounter various things in pictorial books rather than in nature. The images she saw on the books change their shape and color in her mind and, at some point, these pieces connect together and appear as landscape. 

The main painting for this show is 3-meter-wide ‘deep organ’. Oshma painted enlarged internal view of vascular bundle. The scenery that evokes the inside of the living creatures and blood vessels are depicted on the back of key motifs to the story such as crystals, fossils and butterfly wings. In the middle, a spring is upwelling.

Pictorial books themselves make the artist thrilled. They stir up her longing for various creatures, natural phenomenon, and imaginary vehicle she hasn’t see yet, and her imagination to the place they are from. There is no right or wrong way to appreciate her artworks. She is only wandering around in the imaginary world with pictorial books in her hand. We hope you, too, can freely roam around her mysterious world.