Artist: Kohei Yamada

Taka Ishii Gallery Roppongi presents “green back / front,” a solo exhibition of the work of Kohei Yamada. The artist’s second solo show at the gallery, following his first in 2023, features his latest paintings. Concurrently, Taka Ishii Gallery Kyoto will present Yamada’s solo exhibition “The landscape divides, and still I go outside.”

In his paintings, Yamada saturates the canvas with oil to give it fluidity. He then applies broad layers of color with flat brushes to cover much of the surface and partially wipes the paint away, repeating this sequence. He smooths the surface so that the thick materiality of the oil paint no longer registers, even as many layers accumulate and chance bleeds emerge between them. Through this process, he creates a pictorial space all his own, one that is flat yet conveys a rich sense of depth.

The exhibition comprises paintings centered on green tones, a direction Yamada has been pursuing in recent years. In his work, color generates a range of dynamics within the pictorial space. In the many paintings he has made containing red and blue, vivid contrasts emerge where fields of color meet, while the proportions of forms and colors within the rectangular canvas create tensions that give the composition its intensity. Meanwhile, in works dominated by green, Yamada opens a new dialogue around depth and movement in painting. The emphasis shifts away from contrasts between colors toward the way planes advance and recede through interactions generated as layers of paint accumulate. Black lines, one of the hallmarks of Yamada’s work, link disparate elements while sweeping across the surface in energetic undulations. Faint glimpses of colors laid down earlier and now buried in lower layers hint at presences that do not necessarily come to the surface. With each gesture, one element emerges as another recedes, and this process of appearance and disappearance is integrated into the painting with great delicacy.

In this exhibition, the artist further develops his conception of painting as a field in which a range of dynamics emerges from his response to individual colors. Building on his explorations to date, Yamada sets out to create a new kind of landscape, and we invite you to see the results.

Kohei Yamada (b. 1997, Osaka) graduated with a major in oil painting from Musashino Art University in 2020 and completed his master’s degree in the same field at Kyoto University of the Arts in 2022. He is currently based in Tokyo. His solo exhibitions include “The Lightness of Support”, Sukima (Tokyo, 2025); “Borderline”, Arario Gallery Seoul (2025); “Strikethrough”, Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo, 2023); “Like Hiding It”, biscuit gallery (Tokyo, 2022); and “The Way the Lines Come In”, MtK Contemporary Art (Kyoto, 2022). Yamada has also participated in group exhibitions such as “Brick, Breath, Horizon” Zian Gallery x Lisson Gallery (Shanghai, 2025); “Fluid in Forms”, Arario Gallery Shanghai (2025); “Everywhere It Goes”, Mai 36 Galerie (Zurich, 2024); “A Personal View of Japanese Contemporary Art: Takahashi Ryutaro Collection”, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024); “Collection Exhibition”, Museum of Modern Art, Gunma (2024); and “Abstraction (re)creation – 20 under 40”, Le Consortium (Dijon, 2024). He was a BUG Art Award finalist in 2024 and a Contemporary Art Foundation (CAF) Award finalist in 2020.