We are pleased to announce that gallery UG Osaka Umeda will host a solo exhibition"Kirra★" by Naoki NOMURA from Wednesday, April 16 to Tuesday, May 13, 2025.
We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery!
This exhibition marks NAOKI Nomura’s first solo show at gallery UG Osaka Umeda.
This will be Naoki NOMURA's fourth solo exhibition at gallery UG. We invite you to immerse yourself in the whimsical and charming world of Nomura, where mysterious and adorable creatures come to life.
ーgallery UG
”The sounds, smells, and signs that I feel while working in the lush green mountains make me imagine the lives of creatures that are not visible to my naked eyes. My life is filled with small discoveries that move me in casual conversations, encounters with people and things in daily life.
When my imagination and discoveries blend together, a story will be born in my head, and many characters will begin to move around in my mind.
Once I have captured their vague images on paper, I shape them with clay, add layers of colors and load them in the kiln over and over again.They emerge into the real world with expressions that seal their intentions and emotions, gently curved surfaces, and unchanging colors and textures. The process of their gradual appearance in front of our very eyes, and knowing that they had been in my mind makes me fulfilled with joy and excitement.
I hope you would imagine the rest of the stories as these creatures are quietly plotting something."
We are pleased to announce that gallery UG Tennoz will host a solo exhibition "Lost in Laundry" by Ryosuke KAWAHIRA from Friday, April 11 to Sunday, April 27, 2025.
We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery!
Ryosuke KAWAHIRA, who has been one of the gallery’s exclusive artists, was selected from the 2019 UG Project “KONSHIN-TEN”, which is a part of our activities to discover and nurture young artists for around 20 years now.
Recently, he has been making his mark in various places through his remarkable activities, including a solo show at Ginza Tsutaya, a group exhibition in Macau, a solo exhibition at gallery UG Tennoz, and participating in Art Fair Tokyo.
KAWAHIRA transferred the traumas from his imaginative childhood into unique works of art. Using actual briefs as canvas, he depicts the nightmares he had and the ghosts and monsters he imagined.
It seems to be an atonement for the fact that he wet his briefs when he was a child because he could not go to the bathroom in time.
In recent years, he has begun to work more on canvas, and the brief that used to be his material to paint on, has appeared as a hero in his paintings. As his child was born and grew up, the characters overlapped with his own childhood memories and came to be projected more vividly.
At the same time, his work, composed of clear, bold outlines and simple, vividly colored backgrounds, and further comicalized, contains elements of Superflat which has been gaining attention in the contemporary Japanese art scene.
gallery UG
"I wonder where the ghosts and monsters I met in my dreams when I was a child have gone.
As I grew older, my dreams began to become more real, I stopped having nightmares, I don't wear briefs anymore, and I no longer wet the bed.
The battle of bedwetting came to an end, and peace at last...
'Good Night' is a signal for them to fight.
I am sure that in someone's dreams, the bed-wetting battle may still be raging."
"Connecting artworks to people, connecting people to each other through art."
galleryUG are always there for our artists.
We will grow together with the artists and support them from production to promotion.
We aim to further enrich and expand the contemporary art scene by proposing the ideal way for galleries to be.
The motifs chosen by Nami OKADA for her artwork are places she has visited personally. Her artwork arouses feelings of déjà vu and of reaching across time in viewers, whose backgrounds all differ.
Each person forms a distinct impression of a given building or piece of scenery due to the differences in their memories and experiences. Such spaces thus possess a multitude of forms.
It is only when there is commonality in the interpretations of multiple viewers that a given piece of scenery takes on certain meaning.
OKADA brings life to One View by exploring the relationship between pieces of scenery that have taken on meaning due to the overlapping of such commonalities and pieces of scenery whose meaning has yet to take shape.
In moments when I feel like I’m in a place independent of my surroundings,
I sometimes feel like I’m in a different time and space.
The feeling is like clouds or smoke that change shape with no regard for time
that people have to live by, and it also feels like a space of my own.
To turn, various scenes that came up in my imagination from things I encountered.
To express freedom, time and desires that are on the verge of being discarded from memory.
That is what is important, in order for me to be me and for a person to be them self.
2F TERRADA ART COMPLEX Ⅱ, 1-32-8, Higashishinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo
8 minutes walk from Tennozu Isle Station on the Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit Rinkai Line(Exit B)
11 minutes walk from Tokyo Monorail Haneda Airport Line Tennozu Isle Station(Central Exit)
3F TERRADA ART COMPLEX Ⅱ, 1-32-8, Higashishinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo
8 minutes walk from Tennozu Isle Station on the Tokyo Waterfront Area Rapid Transit Rinkai Line(Exit B)
11 minutes walk from Tokyo Monorail Haneda Airport Line Tennozu Isle Station(Central Exit)
11F Daimaru Umeda Department Store
3-1-1, Umeda, Kita-ku, Osaka
From JR Osaka Station from 1-minute walk/JR Kita-Shinchi Station a 6-minute walk
From Midosuji Line Umeda Station from 2-minute walk/Tanimachi Line Higashi-Umeda Station from 8-minute walk/Yotsubashi Line Nishi-Umeda Station a 4-minute walk
From Hankyu Umeda Station from 13-minute walk/Hanshin Umeda Station a 12-minute walk
This is a production studio for exclusive artists of gallery UG, which will open in 2020. It was built to approach and support artists from a long-term perspective.
