Taylor Galleries is pleased to present Love Songs, an exhibition of recent work by Irish-Japanese artist Makiko Nakamura. The exhibition is her fourth with the gallery.

Makiko Nakamura makes abstract mixed media works on paper and canvas using oil paint, Japanese pigments and metal leaf. The work in the exhibition continues to move away from the rigid grid forms that underpinned her earlier paintings, embracing a looser geometry. Shimmering metal leaf and pearlescent pastels dominate, with echoes of intense colour glimpsed through the paintings’ surface.

Her work evolves through an organic, abstract process of applying and removing paint that results in complex stratified pictures: each layer embodying the memory of a particular phase of her life; people she has known and places she has travelled to. The paintings are not love songs about a particular person, but about life, longing and loss: the human condition. Writing about the work, Nakamura says: “I have been listening to love songs, but their beginnings and endings will never happen. In the tunes there are no promises of a realistic future, but nevertheless the beautiful sounds, fantasy voices and sweet winds are waiting for me.”

Born near Kyoto, Japan in 1951, Makiko Nakamura has lived and worked between Ireland and Japan since 1999. She has exhibited extensively in Ireland, Britain, the USA, Japan and France, and completed numerous residencies. Her work is represented in private collections in Europe, America and Japan as well as the public collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), the Gate Theatre, Wexford Opera House, the OPW / State Art Collection and Boyle Civic Collection, among others.