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. 

Azuki Furuya graduated with an MFA from Brooklyn College in 2019. Born in Sapporo, Japan, she lives and works in Tokyo. Furuya's 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. 

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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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