Brush marks play a key role in painting. From ‘sfumato’, a mode of painting invented by Italian Renaissance artists to the gestural mark-making of the American expressionists, there are many historical examples of the curious relationship between brush marks and painting. This exhibition aims to explore this relationship from the point of view of four participating artists, each with varied backgrounds and practices:

Masahiro Suda paints in oil using a limited colour palette. Controlling brushwork and shades of colours freely and fluently, he seeks the beauty of painting found in simplicity. Houran Yokoyama was born into a family of calligraphers and learned the art of traditional Japanese calligraphy from an early age. As he grew interested in contemporary art, he began to explore artistic expressions, mainly through performance, with the aim of blending calligraphy with contemporary art. Andrzej Zieliński constructs a visual world where beauty and the abject clash and amalgamate. Machine-like forms and intense colours with tactile textures provide viewers with a profound aesthetic experience. Masaki Yada looks to the visual language of the 16th century Dutch and Flemish Old masters. While applying the technique of sfumato and gestural mark-making, he endeavours to create paintings of the 21st century.

“In the age of digital media, our visual world is flooded with sterile visual representations. Given that, the physicality that brush marks imply is the notion worthy of revisiting.” – Masahiro Suda.