Akio Nagasawa Gallery Aoyama is pleased to announce the opening of Marefumi Komura’s solo exhibition “Diamond.”

Born in 1977 and based in Tokyo, Marefumi Komura has been dedicating himself with great enthusiasm to his work as a painter.
The title of this exhibition was inspired by an old, handmade children’s book that Komura discovered in a secondhand shop. The book has the Japanese letters for “Diamond” handwritten (apparently by a child) on its cover. “From the playfully original style of the writing, I could imagine how the child must have enjoyed designing those letters. Today the book looks quite old and battered, but for the child it must have been like a glittering treasure back when it was still new and shiny,” the artist explains.

Diamond is known to be the hardest natural mineral on earth, and has thus been described using such powerful expressions as strength, luster, value, invincibility, conquest, rule, unyieldingness and permanence. In spite of their extreme hardness, however, diamonds are by nature easy to break from a specific angle. Characterized by such material/verbal polarity, diamond captivated Komura as a material that symbolizes “the beauty of fragility and imperfection that runs as an undercurrent through [his] works,” and became the new subject of the “Subtract” series of abstract paintings that was unveiled at short notice last year.

On display at this exhibition are a number of new paintings and drawings, while standard and special editions of Works on Paper (2019), a self-published collection of Komura’s drawings, are available at the venue and from the online shop.
We are looking forward to your visit!