Gasa gasa, zawa zawa, zoku zoku, 2022
Grimacing faces and little thieving hands that are tiny, tickling, and mischievous... Makiko Furuichi's subjects come from a tragicomic world tinged with something the Japanese call niyari: the grotesque spirit of a thing that is both ugly and funny. This sincere form of buffoonery strives to explore inanity in all its different manifestations – and more particularly in weakness and fragility. For her, painting is a daily exercise, where her drawings and watercolours act like the pages of a journal recording her thoughts and reflections during a moment of joy or sadness. Makiko Furuichi seeks out the beautiful and the grotesque, the scary and the cute using a variety of references, like Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre monstrosities, or the fantastic melancholy of Johann Heinrich Füssli.
Extract of the text written by Francis Coraboeuf
© Isabelle Meister (portrait)
© Thomas Maisonnasse
Born in 1987 in Kanazawa, Japan, Makiko Furuichi lives and works in Nantes. She graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes (2011) and from the Kanazawa College of Art in Japan (2009). She produces her pictorial work using different media – including installations and sculptures – though she mainly uses watercolours and oil. In 2021, when she was awarded an Ackerman + Fontevraud residency, she whitewashed the former abbey’s monumental cellars. Taking inspiration from cave art, she covered the fifty-three-metre-long (174 ft.) and seven-metre-high (23 ft.) gallery. In her colorful scenes of everyday life, we often find phantasmagorical elements, like the “Yokai”: supernatural, hybrid creatures from Japanese legends. Her work as a publisher includes more than fifteen solo and group publications, including graphic novels and artist’s books.
Website Makiko Furuichi
Instagram @makiko_furuichi
Windows display: courtesy of Fondation Coromandel
Makiko Furuichi
to listen here