Yui Yaegashi

Tsumugi

2023

Fabric stamping on paper

Matted / Unframed

26 × 20.4 cm (mat included)

Edition of 10 copies numbered and signed by the artist, plus 5 artist’s proofs

Related edition: Lace

Price

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The edition

For Tsumugi and Lace, Yui Yaegashi returned to the very material that informs her artistic practice: textiles. The possibilities offered by the structure of the grid and the creation of patterns through layering are indeed essential to the composition of her delicately crafted paintings. The artist has long collected pieces of fabrics and assembled them in notebooks, referring to them as a sort of distant sketches.

The stamping technique used for these two editions makes even more clear the material connection between her body of work and its “source.” Turned into printing plates, the pieces of fabric are directly and manually transferred onto the paper, reproducing with an extraordinary precision the intricate, vibrant texture of the tsumugi (a traditional silk pongee) or the mesmerizing mesh of the lace. In both cases, due to the fineness of the material and the means of its transfer, the threads almost appear like halftone dots, as if they were mechanically printed, momentarily blurring the distinction between weaving, printing, and painting.

The artist

Yui Yaegashi was born in 1985 in Chiba, Japan. She currently lives in Tokyo.

For more than fifteen years now, Yui Yaegashi has dedicated herself to examining the core of abstract painting: the infinite chromatic variations, the interplay between flatness and depth, the delineation of an image and the limits of the canvas. But she achieves this ambitious and seemingly mystical agenda in a quiet, non-dramatic way. Here the Modernist quest meets the materialist conditions of craft. Based on the structure of textiles, her works are composed through a series of predetermined rules in terms of scale, tools, color, and texture, which are transgressed along the way by means of improvisation. This results in mostly small-scale oil paintings of interwoven layers, whose delicate and sovereign presence is undisputable. The capacity to convey so much visual wonder through such concise and humble brushstrokes locates Yaegashi’s territory somewhere at the intersection of Anni Albers’ and Niele Toroni’s works.

Recent solo shows include View from here, an occurrence, LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina, 2022; HINAGA, La Maison de Rendez-vous, Brussels, 2022; purple, black, fog, Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles, 2022; Yui Yaegashi, Queer Thoughts, New York, 2021.

Yui Yaegashi is represented by MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

The exhibition