Reina Sugihara: Room for Spring

OC Bar will be open and hosted by Edek Bartz
Joint opening with Sophie Tappeiner

Reina Sugihara’s enigmatic paintings emerge from a process shaped by intuition and memory. Often relating to living organisms, she departs from specific objects that hold personal significance and transforms them into painterly experimentations by way of abstraction, layering, and erasure. For Room for Spring, her first solo exhibition at the gallery, two talismans served as a point of departure for an exploration of perspective and perceptual ambiguity. Referencing the Ebbinghaus optical illusion—where a circle appears larger or smaller depending on the size of its surrounding shape—Sugihara reflects on how perception is not fixed, but contingent—influenced by context and surroundings.

This idea continues within Sugihara’s painterly practice: In her preoccupation with shapes and their disintegration, forms, proportions, and spatial references are constantly being renegotiated, thus dealing with perception not as something static, but as a dynamic process. Employing gesso and viscous oil paint on rough jute canvases, Sugihara’s textural, haptic paintings—appearing like frozen memories of bodies or objects—gain a peculiar lightness and sense of movement through an apparent perspectival shift between microscopic and macroscopic, interior and exterior. Created directly on the floor, Sugihara approaches her canvases situationally, deciding on their final orientations at the very end of a long painting process.

In Room for Spring (all works 2025), amorphous formations are reminiscent of biological (cell) structures or cosmological phenomena, always with a distinctive shimmer that seemingly refuses to dry. Conceiving of spring not as a celebration of vibrancy but as a melancholic return, Sugihara creates a quiet tension between renewal and decay in her works. Her earthy, rust-colored palette—recalling soil, mud, and oxidized minerals—anchors the gaze in a pictorial world that feels both cosmic and landscape-like. In loosely defined forms and diffuse layers, Sugihara speaks of the slow cycle between earth and sky, where memory, loss, and transformation intertwine. Between the ephemeral and elemental, her works suggest a world in which every new beginning carries the weight of the past.

• Cara Lerchl