Azuki Furuya: Immortality

Fridman Gallery is honored to announce Azuki Furuya's third exhibition with the gallery. 

Furuya's unique material process is itself a form of storytelling, mirroring the cycle of life. She layers colored paper over a drawn composition, sands the paper down to its texture, and applies acrylic, oil and cut-up photographs between the collaged contours to complete the mixed-media painting. The paper shavings are then repurposed into a paper mache object-a recycled memento mori, onto which Furuya photo-transfers the original drawing. Each creative cycle thus consists of three parts: the drawing, the mixed-media painting, and the "ash" of the painting.

The new body of work continues Furuya's exploration of the fragility of life by reflecting on the experience of a close friend who learned of her mother's cancer diagnosis after suffering a miscarriage. The friend was able to get pregnant again, this time carrying to term-an intersection of grief and renewal, which Furuya witnessed firsthand. Drawing from photographs taken in the third trimester and fetal echograms, the artist traces the emotional weight of loss and creation. 

Furuya's striking visual style, reminiscent of marbling, dissolves the figures in abstract curvilinear color fields, immersing the viewer in the interior psychology of her subjects. Many of the works are situated in a bedroom, where the bed becomes a symbol of life's cyclical nature-a site of intimacy, birth, and the eventual moment when death shrouds us.