Maki Na Kamura

From the beginning, Maki Na Kamura's work has presented reality as the sum of all its potential perceptions. The artist has always welcomed both ordinary and extra-ordinary perception of the world in her paintings. In each instance, she therefore proposes an open perception. She goes as far as declaring, via the title of certain works, that what we see in them is already an error. The two letters – “DL” – that feature in the title of every painting in the series presented here are the abbreviation of “Depicted Lies”. [...]

In fact, the artist deliberately inserts disruptions in her work. All her representations are constructed by emphasising the ambiguities which are always contained in the perceived world, and particularly the painted world. This is at the heart of her creative matrix. Thus, in all her work, figurative elements and abstract forms are at once juxtaposed and melded. In addition, the figures which are thus revealed are very often painted with ambiguous scales. All this constitutes the ways in which the artist disables any uniform and univocal reading of the image. [...]

Maki Na Kamura lingers on forms that toy with the subjectivity of the contours: the figure can become the background, and vice versa. Thus, she seems to want to confront some of the observations at the heart of Gestalttheorie (Gestalt Theory), which, among other things, prove that we make a distinction between the figure that stands out and has a defined contour, and the ground which is less distinct, by virtue of which the figure therefore exists. Any perception, any mental representation and any semantic structure would thus be divided into foreground and background.
(in a shortened version of Julia Garimorth in: Un pasé à venir , Exhibition Catalogue [Steine legen, Äpfel lesen], Osthaus Museum, Hagen)

Maki Na Kamura, artist, came to Germany in the nineties. She lives and works in Berlin.