Newspaper article: Colors of Japan. Yuko Sakurai

Translated from German to English with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Colors of Japan

Yuko Sakurai at Gallery Müller

FRANKFURT: Yuko Sakurai has traveled extensively, living in the Netherlands, Venice and France. But above all, as one might have thought before earlier works with geographical titles, traveling was the decisive impulse behind her painting. Yet her paintings are essentially abstract. Sakurai has now been living in Japan again for a good eight years.

Her current exhibition at the Friedrich Müller Gallery, dedicated entirely to works on paper and featuring a selection from twenty years of her work, demonstrates this: Not only the color tones are completely different since then. Sakurai's approach has also visibly evolved since she left Europe. Not only does the artist, who was born in Tsuyama in 1970, now work primarily on Japanese paper instead of handmade paper as before, but she also uses pastel pencils in addition to oil and now also prefers the brush and watercolor here and there. Which is no trifle for the character of her works. The strict order of her compositions disappears, the clearly contoured geometric forms and figures - the yolk-yellow square of “Bicycle Trip to Bokhoven”, for example, or the deep blue surfaces of “Bayerischerwald” - have vanished in favor of a cheerful, lyrical allover in her current works. This is almost regrettable in view of the subtly staged harmony of the early works with Hanjiro Mizuno's ceramics or a storage pot for tea leaves from the Meiji period in the exhibition.

However, one is compensated with atmospheric, impressionistic color tones such as the iridescent jade-colored “Daigasen” or the “Kannabisan” created in 2020 in delicate shades of yellow, blue and pink. Leaves that seem to be inspired by the colors of the Japanese homeland, such as the hills of Tsuyama, instead of Sakurai's travels. One cannot help but get the impression that with these leaves she is longing for another place, a place that was previously completely unknown to Yuko Sakurai. CHRISTOPH SCHÜTTE

Yuko Sakurai, Galerie Friedrich Müller, Frankfurt, Braubachstraße 9, until May 17.

May 12, 2025