Onishi Gallery is proud to present Megumi Nagai in FACE, a solo exhibition, featuring a series of new pieces that focus on vivid depictions of faces. Each piece incorporates facial imagery to illustrate shifting outward appearances and what they reveal about inner realities. Megumi has created powerful, exquisitely-detailed, ultra-realistic, yet infinitely surreal pieces. Strongly inspired by the natural world and the naturalistic art of Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Katsushika Hokusai, each of Megumi’s finely articulated renderings has the power to captivate and transport the viewer into a self-contained universe full of life.
Through this show, Megumi seeks to provide each member of her audience with a unique viewing experience. By looking at the works from different angles, the viewer should become aware that “faces are fluid, and depending on one’s perspective, they will reveal different aspects of the work.” Megumi concentrated on the face in particular because she felt it was a strong symbol of the facets of ourselves that we show to the world and the different ways in which the world interprets what we choose to reveal and hide.
Specifically in her “Paradise” series (I, II, III, and IV), Megumi has depicted her own versions of heavenly environments. Through her incorporation of facial imagery in these pieces, she reveals both a connection and a dichotomy between previous pieces that used subtly similar imagery to depict visions of hell and the underworld.
As in previous years, Megumi works in oil paint and mixed media on multiple types of wood. She possesses a deep respect for wood as a medium, believing that “Wood contains spirit; it is alive, an element.” Her style and technique change according to the wood she uses, varying based on texture, grain, color, and the irregularities that make each piece unique. In doing so, she combines ancient Japanese artistic traditions dating from before the Heian period (c. 794‑1185) with Western techniques to express her own singular vision of the world. As Elizabeth Sackler, President of the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, explains about Megumi, “Her artistic process is reminiscent of the great surrealists…What does result, again and again, are artworks of unusual beauty and power.”
Megumi was born in 1951 in Japan. She received her degree in 1975 from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and was chosen in 2008 by NHK Japan Broadcasting Corporation for inclusion in a book featuring select graduates of the university. Her work has shown in numerous exhibitions in New York and Tokyo and has been selected for inclusion in several competitions. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.