Maki Na Kamura | Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA Berlin) | 16.09.-04.11.2023

until 04.11. | #4034ARTatBerlin | Contemporary Fine Arts presents from 16. September 2023 (Opening: 15.09.) a double exhibition by the artist Maki Na Kamura. The double exhibition will take place at Galerie Michael Werner Berlin and Contemporary Fine Arts.

Modernism confronted painting with the finding of social insignificance. Since then, no theory has been able to justify why painting is still being done and why it should concern even the last person. Painting’s struggle for survival in the 20th century, which was nevertheless so successful, can be traced back to a special strategy of the artists, namely to transform the traditional means of painting into a contemporary form. The legitimacy of this discipline is based on the inexhaustible possibilities of using colour, surface, form, lines, light and mass to produce new, unprecedented images. And as assertive as this strategy was in the metropolis of Paris, it found a new home in West Berlin after 1960 in the gallery of Michael Werner and in the late nineties in the Contemporary Fine Arts Galerie of Nicole Hackert and Bruno Brunnet.

Maki Na Kamura now places her new paintings in the tradition of these galleries. In an act of concentration, she has perceived the pressure of legitimacy weighing on her métier, recognised it as a problem and found a remarkable solution. The dreamlike – or nightmarish – colourfulness of the palette is Maki Na Kamura’s signal, adapted to the contemporary situation, to finally wake up again from the twilight state of painting that has lasted far too long.

She transforms painting elementally into painting. This refers to the always clearly contoured, two-dimensional and differently structured colour units from which she organises the whole of the painting. With the painting, Maki Na Kamura invents a strictly ambivalent carrier of meaning that, beyond the six traditional ones, brings a seventh, contemporary pictorial constituent into play: namely, the viewer with his or her capacity for association. She creates a hitherto unknown, virtual representational potential of the image, in which painting with traditional means can rise up again altogether.

For this purpose, Maki Na Kamura has compiled an extensive catalogue of body paintings that on the one hand ties her figure inventions back to traditional painting and on the other hand opens up to contemporary figure phenomena. The generalisation allows new figures to be synthesised from figures by Luca Signorelli and those of K-pop dancers. Through this contemporary figuration, Maki Na Kamura re-establishes the epic character of classical painting, the narrative of which, however, is left to the viewer. The virtual pictorial content is revealed from the corner of the eye, there where the instinct to complete shapes has been preserved in every human being. Maki Na Kamura’s new pictures unfold their irrational power spontaneously when you walk past them. And then return in amazement.

Maki Na Kamura lives and works in Berlin.

The publishing house of the Walther und Franz König bookshop is publishing a catalogue to accompany the exhibition.

Opening: Friday, 15 September 2023 from 6 to 8 pm., Grolmanstraße 32/33, 10623 Berlin, Hardenbergstraße 9A, 10623 Berlin

Image caption: Maki Na Kamura, Unit I, 2023, oil and Eintempera on canvas, 190 x 140 cm, Courtesy: Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin, Photo: Jens Ziehe.