Nostos

Kaliner is pleased to present Nostos, Kim Uchiyama’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition’s title, Nostos, is Greek for “return” or “homecoming”. Inspired by a resent rereading of Homer’s The odyssey, the artist is re-envisioning points of departure and points of return—the outward movement and circling back of the journey as a form of narrative structure. A story within a story, concentric and digressive, yet always returning to its origin. In the Nostos exhibition, Uchiyama’s work with color brings back color not only as a subject but the method of arrival.

In her painting, Uchiyama uses references to the language of ancient classical architecture to order space through geometry and motif. Repetition of forms builds clarity, but color destabilizes the symmetry, subverting perceived order while conveying resonance. For Uchiyama, an exceptionally sensitive colorist, each color carries its own tectonics, an internal architecture that—when placed in adjacency and variance with other colors—constructs new relationships and suggests new ideas for abstraction. The geometry of light, inspired by the shifting of the sun as it moves across the sky, is critical and evident in these works: here, natural light acts upon ancient architecture which, at first seen as fixed and rigid, is transformed by the golden light that plays upon and softens its stones.

Uchiyama’s colors embody distinct attributes that evoke sensation through their allusive character— earth reds, marine blues, forest greens, wheat golds, rose pinks—these Mediterranean-influenced hues imply the presence of natural energies that work to transform her painting into a lived experience.