This exhibition features twelve new works from her ongoing series, ‘Reflection’, which depicts the reflection of water. Unlike the rich color palette of her previous works, the presented works are rendered in black and white. Here, the absence of color serves to purify and to deepen Kagioka’s continuing interest in capturing the ephemeral moment when a familiar landscape transforms into an abstract vision.

Having trained in oil painting and mural décor in Japan and France, Kagioka incorporates in her practice a unique painting style that explores and transcends the boundaries between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, abstraction and representation, visible and invisible. ‘Reflection’ takes cropped photographic images of water reflections, and transforms them into complex abstract imagery by applying multiple layers of fabric, sand, and paint, which are then scraped off the surface to reveal the layer beneath. Kagioka’s work is thus the outcome of repeated construction and erosion, distortion and compression, which create an intricate sculptural space within the surface of the painting.

The images are freed from their narrative context, geographic reference, the passage of time, and instead emerge as crystallizations of the rhythm, color and form of water. In her new works, the interplay of these basic compositional elements is intensified by the subtle variations of the monochromatic color scheme, inviting us to take a moment to immerse ourselves in the infinite undulation of the pictorial space.