Turn Gallery is pleased to present The passenger, a two-person exhibition featuring artists Hiroya Kurata and Kathryn Lynch, opening January 14, 2026, with a reception from 6 – 8 PM.

Time moves paint, paint moves time. Across Lynch’s foggy harbors and unyielding boats, and Kurata's lush fields and billowing trees, these artists—although different in their approach—merge together in an examination and mediation of time. The Passenger traces the quiet yet elastic ways Kurata and Lynch transcribe experience into image: how longing, waiting, drift, and return can be held with a kind of patience that trusts the present, remembers the past, and anticipates the future.

Hiroya Kurata’s paintings serve as quiet reflections on contemporary life, capturing personal, natural and urban moments that might otherwise disappear. Having grown up between Japan and the United States, he developed a heightened awareness of his surroundings and a desire to find belonging. In this new series, Kurata abandons the direct human figure in favor of empty yet inviting chairs and wooden benches, prompting us to wonder whether they signal an arrival, a recent departure, or a presence that still lingers, barely perceptible. Using high tonal color and careful handling of paint, his trees echo and envelope the curves of female bodies, while flowers nestled into the hills and shadows of grasses create a familiar and warm environment. Kurata’s use of oils shift from dense to sketchy, creating a palpable emotional presence to his storytelling and reinforcing a desire for engagement and reflection in a world of constant change.

Lynch’s practice is driven by both leaving and return, often revisiting the same waterways, mountains and city streets throughout the seasons and years. Here, from the shores of Maine to Montauk, Lynch's boats activate as steady vessels, carrying us through her waters with dreamlike ease. Her seas are deliberately calm, offering not turbulence but peace—a quiet passage that welcomes surrender across the unknown. Lynch paints not a specific place but the feeling that a place evokes. In all of her canvases, there is an interplay of light and dark, sensuous brushstrokes with smudged or loose round edges that refuse to indulge in the illusions of perfection, and in return are suffused with joy.

In The passenger, Lynch and Kurata together examine the complex and the fleeting simple satisfactions of everyday moments, inviting us to slow down, breath and take a look.