TOKYO.- MAKI Gallery is presenting Year-End Light, its second solo exhibition with Ayumu Yamamoto, at Maebashi Galleria Gallery 2. The show features new paintings by the Tokyo-based artist alongside a site- specific installation extending through the venue’s eight-meter-high atrium.
Yamamoto sees her work as a reflection of reality with its infinite dualities, moving between opposing currents like light and shadow, composure and passion, order and chaos, and figuration and abstraction. Her paintings embody the tension and harmony among these contrasting forces, in doing so embracing rather than denying life’s inherent contradictions. While engaging with such broad themes, they are also deeply personal reflections on the artist’s own fluid and ambiguous relationship to her surroundings.
The exhibition title, Year-End Light, draws inspiration from the decorative lights and neon signs whose artificial glow fills the night sky during the holiday season. The year’s end is a peculiar time, filled with festive excitement and anticipation for what lies ahead, yet tinged with a quiet sense of melancholy and longing. Yamamoto translates these contradictory emotions into complex, mosaic-like compositions where bright and muted colors intermingle freely, portraying the transient and paradoxical nature of our shared reality.
From canvases richly layered with paint to drawings rendered with delicate lines, Yamamoto’s works emerge through a dynamic interplay of diverse elements. Viewers are encouraged to navigate these disparate fragments and overlapping textures, tracing a visual narrative as one would a map unfolding before them. Immersed in moments where light and darkness intertwine, the artist’s eclectic creations invite us to pause and explore this complicated world we all live in.
Born in 1995 in Tokyo, where she continues to live and work today, Ayumu Yamamoto received both her BFA and MFA in Oil Painting from Musashino Art University in 2018 and 2020, respectively. The human figure, as well as various flora and fauna, are recurring motifs in the artist’s pictorial universe. While Yamamoto’s paintings seem to depict jaunty and blissful moments, such as lovers spending time together amid lush greenery, a myriad of contradictory emotions and narratives are prevalent in her work, exuding an unsettling atmosphere. Palpable tensions are created within the frame through the coexistence of opposing elements— intimacy and discord, light and shadow, balance and instability—drawing the viewer deeper into a fantastical labyrinth. Hovering between representation and abstraction, the paintings attempt to depict the “real” world and its complicated nature through the artist’s unpredictable application of oil paint.
Yamamoto’s solo exhibitions include Travel the Topics, MAKI Gallery (Tokyo, 2025); Shiny at Night, Court Gallery KUNITACHI (Tokyo, 2021); Our Vacation, Open Letter (Tokyo, 2020); Quiet dining table, blue bird, Gallery HEARTY (Gunma, Japan, 2019); and SHINAINARU·ShinAiNaru·Shinainaru·shinainaru, Gallery FACE TO FACE (Tokyo, 2019). In 2021, the artist was the recipient of WATOWA ART AWARD’s Special Jury Award. Yamamoto’s work has been presented globally at various art fairs and group shows, and in 2023, she marked her North American debut by exhibiting in The Armory Show.
