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Mio Yamato: 呼吸する星 / The Breathing Star
Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan
- By Sylvia Walker
With “呼吸する星 / The Breathing Star” the Japanese artist Mio Yamato makes her debut show in the United States. The solo exhibition runs from March 18 until April 29, 2023, at Heather Gaudio Fine Art in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her painterly practice resulted in international recognition, as she is lauded for her signature marks of pearl-like dots. In doing so, Yamato creates lines, waves, textures, and gradients, emulating nature’s most intriguing structures and elevating ink, oil, and canvas to almost living organisms.
Mio Yamato—born in 1990 in Shiga, Japan, residing and working in Kyoto, Japan—showcases a series of new paintings on both panel and canvas at Heather Gaudio Fine Art. “As a child, Yamato spent hours in her grandfather’s orchid greenhouse, observing and keeping notations and sketches of the plants as they grew and blossomed. She learned to understand how blooms thrive in ideal environmental conditions and the way other organisms, such as moss, can symbiotically flourish as well. From these experiences came the idea of the dot. Her first Red Dot, as she dubs it. With this singular mark, Yamato developed notions behind ever-changing continuums. For the artist, there can be no independent existence; everything in the universe is connected. We are all stardust, sourced from other stars, supernovas that exploded into fragments that went into other stellar structures and eventually into all living things.” (Press release—Heather Gaudio Fine Art)
In this show, Yamato takes things a step further, moving beyond the two-dimensional boundaries of the medium of painting. Think of the thin veils of scrim, and the site-specific installation beyond the gallery walls in the form of a large pane of glass, functioning as the outside window of the gallery space—a subtle yet powerful intervention—characteristic of the quietness of her expressive oeuvre. One can almost sense a form of life residing in her meticulously crafted dot structures or swaths of fabric. Her fascination and emulation of nature enable her works to enter realms beyond the picture plane as if entering the natural, organic world. They almost feel like organisms—dynamic subjects instead of static objects. Mio Yamato states she allows her pictures “to grow autonomously” while she observes and controls this metamorphosis in her painterly process.
The exhibition runs until April 29, 2023. For more information, please visit Heather Gaudio Fine Arts’s website.
Last Updated on May 23, 2023
Sylvia Walker
Sylvia Walker (b. 1986, US) is an art historian, essayist, art critic, and curator. After contributing to numerous publications, and curating exhibitions in the United States of America and beyond, she currently works as the assistant director of Contemporary Art Issue (CAI).
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