Midori Sato "Secret Garden"

A closet packed with varying colors of clothes; a shoe-rack onto which high-heels are carefully ar- ranged; vivid and brilliant flowers. Midori Sato's paintings like jewelry boxes filled with girls' aspirations. The audacious and nimble touch of her brushstrokes, seemingly absorbed within the picture plane as we look, dissolves the contours of her motifs. Within a painting that shares both a sense of concrete embodiment and one of abstraction, one we can perceive the strong sense of charm exuded by the vibrant colors and excellently crafted compositions. As been pointed out by art historian and art critic Shuji Takashina, Sato's paintings are brimming with a sense of allure and rapture and show a splendid world without parallel. Regarding this exhibition, the artist remarks: 'I have begun to really think from my heart, how truly wonderful flowers and plants are. The each of tiny tiny lilac flower that I encountered abroad - A violet with a charming hue. A rose so beautiful it gives me goosebumps. A camellia with a radiance like that of corsage, blooming magnificently. A strange plants with airy puffs. And then a green which expands in complex ways, overflowing with life-force. The more I commune with nature, more I realize that in fact, everything that has ever captivated me up until now has its roots in nature. Aesthetic gods are redolent within nature, as are the most beautiful colors and forms - this I felt with my whole self.' In her third solo show with Tomio Koyama Gallery, Sato here exhibits thirty paintings that are newly created with perceiving 'nature' as a driving force of her creation. We warmly welcome you to come and peruse the mysterious and refined world view of Midori Sato.

Midori Sato was born in Aichi Prefecture in 1984. She graduated from Oil Painting Course, Nagoya University of Arts in 2008, and received M.F.A. from Graduate School of Tokyo Zokei University in 2010. Based in Nagoya, she continues to work successfully across an ever-expanding range of fields; her work has been selected on the cover art of Akutagawa Prize-winning writer Fuminori Nakamura's novel 'Last Winter, We Parted' (2013, Gentosha Inc.), within Daishi Matsunaga's film 'Pieta in the Toilet' (2015) , and in a collaboration for the illustrations of Maha Harada's novel 'Hanatsubaki' (Shiseido). In the exhibition "VOCA 2013"(2013, Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo), she won the Judge's Prize of the Ohara Museum of Art Award, and the same museum purchased her work for its own collection. Further, in her solo exhibition last year at Shiseido Gallery "Embracing for Painting", she presented the works that utilized the mirror were highly praied.