Rieko Koga is a contemporary Japanese artist currently living and working in Paris. The artist’s work stands out by a monochrome yet expressive style, and an astounding mastery of contemporary textile language. Her handmade embroidery and stitches on white fabric build nearly sculptural and graphic-like objects and her works often acquire the features of installation art. Rieko Koga’s work embraces the experiences of Japanese and Western culture, existential themes, intersections of nature and civilization.
According to art critic Sonia Recasens, for Rieko Koga embroidery is an essentially spiritual practice, and the patient work involved invites contemplation. The thread of “encounter and memory” that she weaves becomes the seismograph of her moods, as if her prayers accompanied the needle in the poetic writing of the stitches. Fabric is no longer a piece of clothing but a membrane, like a second skin, imprinted with traces of reality, of memory and of the psyche. As she doesn’t make any preliminary drawing, Rieko Koga embroiders like she thinks, like she writes, like she breathes, like she dreams. She stretches the thread of time with her needle for an intense exploration of deep self projected outside herself in the shape of stitches. This subtle alchemy of mind and body carefully interwoven by the magic of thread and needle touches and disturbs us.
The exhibition is part of LACONICA: INTERNATIONAL ART BIENNIAL DEDICATED TO MINIMAL ART TO OPEN IN VILNIUS
Opening reception: 1 October, 6 pm at Pamėnkalnio Gallery (1 Pamėnkalnio St., Vilnius) and 7:30 pm at Tsekh Gallery (6 Vytenio St., Vilnius).
The title of the new biennial refers to its semantic and aesthetic character: OT is conceived as a platform and space for artists that develop minimal or minimalist language in their work with such keywords as reduction of form, reserved narration, aesthetics of silence, abstraction, monochrome, etc.
The Laconica biennial also seeks to bring visual art and other fields of art together, to generate creative ideas and collaborative projects, and draw attention to relevant contemporary trends and ways of thinking.
