Yukine Yanagi: Silent Sonata
January 11 - February 1, 2025
One day during my meditation practice, a nature-spirit came to me, laughing like the wind and completely ephemeral in shape and color. Her image keeps morphing in front of my eyes, and I cannot see her clearly. I ask her “show me your face” and she shows me two eyes, and then, two thousand. She showed me systems in which everything flowed into each other. It was the most beautiful and terrifying thing I have ever seen.
- Yukine Yanagi, 2024
parrasch heijnen is pleased to present Yukine Yanagi: Silent Sonata, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Yukine Yanagi (b. 1998, Tokyo, Japan) is a painter of psychological and spiritual landscapes. Drawn to the depiction of the existential and deeply personal meanings of life observed in and via nature, Yanagi reflects on themes of hope within the coexisting and contradicting forces of absence and presence, wonder and terror, and yearning and detachment.
Influenced by Eastern philosophy and spirituality, as well as the conceptual lineage of the German Romantic movement, Yanagi’s abstract language of organic mark-making alludes to the figurative while conveying symbolic representations of emotions suspended in time. As she explores bodily awareness and nature’s elemental constructions, she plays with scale to seek an understanding of our human connection with the souls of the natural world and the responsibilities that come with this innate coexistence.
In this new body of work, the self is completely dissolved into abstracted landscapes, each containing primal forces of unique personalities and desires. Interested in painting’s alchemical properties of optics, color, and tactility, the artist often uses her hands to sculpt out or to erase the paint until the presence of the image is achieved and life is given to the subject. In A Persistence of Growth, 2024, the landscape is a harmonious ecosystem of layered colors depicting organic systems, natural phenomena, and busy networks suspended in a convergence of ground and sky; Yanagi’s constant search for, and excavation of, hope is represented in paint through the action of reaching into the unknown, as seen in Face to Face, 2024.
“It is that energy and that life force that I search for within the work, a visceral kind of confrontation. It is energy contained, spewed out, an emblem of hope, of searching within a process of anxiety and uncertainty, and arriving at something beautiful, passed from me to the viewer,” Yanagi explains.
Yukine Yanagi, a Chinese-Japanese artist, has continued to live and work in Rhode Island after receiving her BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI) in 2020. In 2023, Yanagi presented her first solo exhibition, The Ultraviolet Principle, at G/ART/EN Gallery in Como, Italy. Group exhibitions include: Analog Diary, Beacon, NY (2024); Latitude Gallery, New York, NY (2023); Apt13 Gallery, Providence, RI (2023); and SPY Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2023), among others. She teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.
Yukine Yanagi: Silent Sonata will be on view at parrasch heijnen, 1326 S. Boyle Avenue, Los Angeles, from January 11 - February 1, 2025. The opening reception has been postponed due to the emergency conditions in Los Angeles. Gallery staff are available to guide you through our exhibitions virtually via Zoom upon request. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (323) 943-9373 or info@parraschheijnen.com.
(Image above)
YUKINE YANAGI, Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes, 2024. oil on canvas. 36 x 60 inches.
