Mio Yamato: 呼吸する星 / The Breathing Star
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.
HEATHER GAUDIO FINE ART
March 18 — April 29, 2023
New Canaan, Connecticut, US
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. 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 with nature’s most intriguing structures, elevating ink, oil and canvas to almost living organisms.
“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 for 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 with nature enables her works to enter realms beyond the picture plane, as if entering the natural, organic world. They almost feel as 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.
