Shiori Matsumoto, “Sleepless Night”
October 29th – November 27th, 2022
Northport, NY– Haven Gallery is honored to present “Sleepless Night”, a solo show of new work from Japan based artist Shiori Matsumoto. “Sleepless Night” is Matsumoto’s first solo show in the United States and features her highly detailed, narrative portraits of her ageless female sitters amidst surrealistic reveries. The setting of nightfall, a time often associated with the unworldly and the curious, pervades this collection. Otherworldly beings, magical forces and transmogrified forms are ever present in her latest series creating mystery around whether Matsumoto’s sitters are in the dreaming or waking world. ABOUT SHIORI MATSUMOTO I was born in the Kagawa-prefecture of Japan in 1973. I studied oil painting in The Kyoto Saga University of Arts. The paintings which I am going to express are dreamlike, melancholy and cryptic atmospheres with girls who play with imagination and try to change the world with their own ritual. “Here are children as fables, suspended in time, their breath still warm in their throats, the world around each figure a dream of perfect context, full of mystery and exquisite symbolic and surreal detail. The artist’s extensive and complex treatise on the life of girls is as constant in its solemn weight as it is in its relentless seduction of the eye. These children are deep and aware. They are in every instance involved in a deep, two-way conversation with all that surrounds them. Their fragile beauty is sometimes infused with resolve, and other times with an air of weary resignation. But in both cases one is sure that they somehow know that they themselves are the greatest mystery, that they will persevere and carry forward. While Shiori Matsumoto’s moving and lovely paintings pay an affectionate homage to European surrealist and symbolic painters they only begin with this influence. The work floats further into a realm of subtle and nuanced sadness that has all the compelling pathos of sakura no saishū-bi. To my eye this transporting effect is somehow profoundly, beautifully and uniquely Japanese.” Jock Sturges Seattle 2014 – (ARTWORK SHIPS approx.. DECEMBER 16th)
