Over the past few years, Claudia Kogachi has established herself as one of Aotearoa’s artists-to-watch for her playful paintings and textile works depicting scenes from her life filtered through pop-culture and folklore. New Zealand-born gallerist Phillida Reid kept abreast of Kogachi’s rise from her post in London, inviting the artist to show at Tokyo Gendai in June last year alongside Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska.
Reid has now announced representation of Kogachi, following her debut solo exhibition at the gallery, Labour of Love (20 January–17 February 2024).
In a recent press release, the gallery stated: “Kogachi works across painting, textiles and installation to produce scenes both personal and imaginary, tenderly depicting herself and those close to her carrying out everyday activities, or inserted into dream-like or comical situations.
In Kogachi’s work, the everyday and the fantastical are formed of the same substance. Across medium, they share her characteristic textures, palettes, and atmosphere, so that the even the most bana scenes take on a sheen of reverie and romance. As a result, the fanciful also takes on a frankness: a clarity that strips away pretence and favours sensual immediacy. Kogachi’s grandmother (her obaachan, a frequent muse) preparing musubi in her Hawaii kitchen, with rollers in her hair; or her girlfriend’s wood shop, where the couple embrace at the drill press, occupy the same world as the pair of beluga whales which swim in the air, under orange moonlight, above the sea.
Her story-book-like scenarios, populated by creatures and animated elements from nature, personal life, films, or folklore, embrace the awkward, charming, the whimsical and the magical, through a distinctive visual language of bold block colour and textural touch, amounting to works on simultaneously friendly and provocative presence.”
Related
Introducing the Artist Advice Bureau