Azuki Furuya

Fridman Gallery is pleased to announce the 2023 Artist Residency program at the gallery’s location in Beacon, NY.

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Reflecting Fridman Gallery’s commitment to representing interdisciplinary artists from around the world and fostering research-based experimental art practices, the residency will provide an opportunity for international artists to spend several months living and working in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The second artist-in-residence will be Alina Grasmann from Germany, whose residency in the spring of 2022 will culminate in a solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery’s Beacon location. Additional artists will be selected by invitation. The residency program will strive to inspire the visiting artists and the local community through events such as artist talks and open studios.

Azuki Furuya graduated with an MFA from Brooklyn College in 2019. Previously, she had received art degrees from Tama Art University in Tokyo, and University of the Arts in London. Born in Sapporo, Japan, she lives and works in Tokyo. Her ingenious works on paper explore the brightness of life and the fragility of existence, with the material process itself as a form of storytelling.
 

After drawing the composition from a photograph, she builds it up with layered bits of colored paper and fragments of the photograph, then meticulously sands down the papered surface until it is exposed like a derelict billboard, and paints inside and around the contours. The resulting artworks are highly textured and luminous, a testament to the duality of precariousness and persistence of life, identity and myth.
 

In addition, with the shavings leftover from the sanding, she remakes paper pulp, shapes it into a sculptural form. She transfers and draws the image onto the reconstituted surface. In her art, the images become ingredients in the never ending process of re-formation of identity.

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