LOVE AND LUST | Mizuki Nishiyama

"Nishiyama is a painter who is recognised for her deeply evocative paintings. Ranging from acrylics to mixed mediums, Nishiyama’s often large scaled paintings confront and strike audiences through her use of form and colour.

Nishiyama’s work intimately explores the enigma which is human fragility. As a continuation from her first solo exhibition regarding the human condition; the artist is extending her philosophy, exploring the relationship between love and lust.

Loosely inspired by the Italian Renaissance Poet; Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy; Inferno. Dante’s Inferno is a narrative poetry following two characters’ journey to the depths of hell. Specifically, the second ring of hell in Canto V, Dante writes about the ennobling power of attraction, and the destructive force of possessive sexual desire. Dante completely desexualises the conception of lust within Inferno, and brings to light an ethical and philosophical complicity instead. Nishiyama’s series may be erotic or lascivious. However, sharing the same fine line between Dante’s theory on carnal instincts, and our state of simply being human."

-Tenri Cultural Institute of New York, New York, 2020