Arisa Yoshioka

Dreams may be described as fragments of our memories reassembled to create meaning. In Arisa Yoshioka's paintings, these fragments mysteriously emerge from their surfaces, awash in soft breaths of color. They unfold before our eyes like ancient fairy tales, where faces and fractioned limbs disintegrate amongst delicate patterns and tangled brushwork, echoing the distressed tapestries of early Tibetan Thangka. Working primarily in oil on linen or burlap supports, her subdued palette and diaphanous brushwork conjure the earliest works of post-impressionists like Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, yet her use of recurrent motifs and collaged space owes much to the work of the surrealists.

In a practice informed by the past, but grounded in modernity, Yoshioka's approach to painting is a mixture of intuition and investigation which effortlessly brings nostalgia to the present. Her paintings embody an intimate poeticism that balances elegance with naiveté, where visions coalesce and promise a momentary glimpse into a magical universe.

Arisa Yoshioka is a self taught artist who was born in Mongolia and raised in Tokyo. She currently lives and works in New York.