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Artists > KAWAUCHI Rikako

川内 理香子

1990 Born in Tokyo, Japan

2015 Tama Art University, Bachelor’s degree, Oil Painting

2017 Tama Art University, Master’s degree, Oil Painting

Currently lives and works in Tokyo.

Solo Exhibition

2025 Please Don’t Disturb, CADAN Yurakucho, Tokyo

2024 Softest Chain, Kamakura Gallery, Kanagawa / Food, animals, organs, plants, bodies etc, everything outside me is everywhere in the air. I breathe them in, I breathe them out, VANDER GRINTEN GARALIE, Cologne, Germany / Under the sun, agnes b. galerie boutique, Tokyo

2023 Even the pigments in paints were once stones, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo / The Voice of the Soul, ERA GALLERY, Milan, Italy / human closely, Lurf Museum, Tokyo / line & colors, N&A Art SITE, Tokyo

2022 Make yourself at home, Nihombashi Mitsukoshi Honten, MITSUKOSHI CONTEMPORARY GALLERY, Tokyo / Colours in summer, GINZA TSUTAYA BOOKS, GINZA ATRIUM, Tokyo / Lines, VAN DER GRINTEN GALERIE, Cologne, Germany

2021 Empty Volumes, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo / afterimage aftermyth, A/D Gallery, Tokyo

2020 drawings, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo / drawings, OIL by Bijutsu Techo, Tokyo /
Myth & Body, Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi, Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery, Tokyo

2018 human wears human / bloom wears bloom, Kamakura Gallery, Kanagawa / Tiger Tiger, burning bright, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo

2017 Something held and brushed, TOKYOMYOAN GALLERY, Tokyo / NEWoMan ART wall Vol.7: Rikako KAWAUCHI, NEWoMan ART wall, JR Shinjuku Station, Tokyo

2016 ART TAIPEI 2016, WAITINGROOM Booth, Taipei World Trade Center, Taipei, Taiwan / Back is confidential space. Behind=Elevator, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo

2015 Collector and Artist: Rikako KAWAUCHI, T-Art Gallery, Tokyo / SHISEIDO ART EGG Vol.9: Go down the throat, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo

Group Exhibition

2025 S.F collection no Ichibetsu vol.2, N&A Art SITE, Tokyo

2023 New Horizon: Vision of the Future, ARTS MAEBASHI, Gunma / Body, Love, Gender, Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea / MATERIAL TRANSFORMATION, Van der Grinten Galerie, Germany
/ Paper Whispers, Schönfeld Gallery, Brussels, Belgium 
/ Good Morning Japan, Nassima Landau Art Foundation, Tel Aviv, State of Israel 
VOCA 30 YEARS STORY / KOBE, Hyogo / Prefectural Museum of Art Branch Haradanomori Gallery, Hyogo 
/ From the museum collection 2022: third period, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Aichi

2022 OKETA COLLECTION: YES YOU CAN, WHAT MUSEUM, Tokyo / OKETA COLLECTION: THE SIRIUS, Spiral Garden, Tokyo
 / VOCA 30 Years Story / Tokyo, The fiest foor lobby of the Dai-ichi Life Group Hibiya Head Office, Tokyo 
VOCA 2022, The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo
 SPRING SHOW, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo

2021 TERRADA ART AWARD 2021 Finalists Exhibition, TERRADA Warehouse G3-6F, Tokyo
 Abstraction by CADAN, Isetan Shinjuku Store Main Building 6F art gallery, Tokyo 
/ Viewing Room Exhibition, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo

2020 —INSIDE THE COLLECTOR’S VAULT, VOL.1— @WHAT, Tokyo / Input / Output, GINZA TSUTAYA BOOKS, ATRIUM@GINZA SIX,Tokyo / Blossoming of individuality Post-Isaku generation, people who learned at the Bunka Gakuin from Showa to Heisei, Musee Le Vent, Karuizawa, Nagano / Spinner Markt, Spiral Garden, Tokyo

2019 Photo, 3F/3kai, Tokyo drawings, Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo

2018 Museum of Together - Circus, Shibuya Hikarie 8/COURT, Tokyo

2017 spiral take art collection 2017 “SHU SHU SHU SHO”, SPIRAL, Tokyo / NEWSPACE, WAITINGROOM, Tokyo / Museum of Together, SPIRAL, Tokyo / The 40th 5 Art Universities Exhibition, The National Art Center Tokyo, Tokyo

2016 Stereotypical, GALLERY PARC, Kyoto

2015 Dead Henge / Aesthetic, HIGURE 17-15 cas, Tokyo

2014 The 1st CAF Award - Winning Award Exhibition, TABLOID GALLERY, Tokyo / That I shall say goodnight till it be morrow, Shinjuku Ganka Gallery, Tokyo

2013 TOTSU Exhibition, TKP Theater Kashiwa, Art Line Kashiwa 2013, Chiba / Home Made Family, CASHI Refregilater, Tokyo / Sleep No More, Tama Art University Art Festival, Tokyo

2012 OTHER PAINTING XI, Pepper’s Gallery, Tokyo / TOTSU Exhibition, Sogo Kashiwa, Art Line Kashiwa 2012, Chiba / Donuts k, Tama Art University Art Festival, Tokyo

Awards

2022 VOCA AWARD 2022

2021 TERRADA ART AWARD Finalist, Yuki Terase Award

2015 Shiseido Art Egg 2014 The 1st CAF Award, Kenjiro Hosaka Award

2014 ART IN THE OFFICE 2014

Statement

For me, art offers a tantalizing encounter with a subject that is willing to spar with you. A painting is a space that pushes back against you with a kind of gentle resistance, but which can be oppressive nonetheless. In all the works that I consider to have been well crafted, I feel my body and thoughts churn, rise up, and expand along with this space, like a balloon inflating: I nudge the volume as it swells, tenuously, while the work gradually grows and takes on a tangible shape. Sometimes I can feel myself being repulsed. As my body and thoughts come up and press against this swollen, balloon-like volume, I begin to sense my physicality for the first time, as if I had struck or bumped into something.

Making a work is akin to walking across a tightrope with an abyss gaping beneath you. I have to make an extremely strenuous effort to not fall off the rope: it is only through a supreme act of will that I manage to finish the piece without losing my balance.

Just like how the reflection in the mirror is both myself and something removed from me, I feel that a finished painting is both a reflection of myself, as well as a foreign other detached from me. Through these reflections, I sense my own bodily contours taking on a sharper definition.

For me, to draw is neither to impress an image onto a surface, nor a matter of giving oneself over to the contingencies associated with my materials as they unravel on the canvas. For me, to accept the contingency of others is also to grapple with and learn to accept one’s own physicality. My body reacts instantly to what happens in the real world at the moment that the image in my mind takes shape on the canvas. This process is as much a dialogue as it is a struggle, or a game, or a collaborative endeavor.

I try to draw, reflexively, so that my consciousness doesn’t catch up with my hand. I don’t make an attempt to chase after some finished image, nor do I look back to ponder the lines that I have already drawn. I always approach the canvas or paper as if I were furtively pushing my body against a tensely stretched membrane.

When I work with wire, resin, or neon, this tension is abruptly manifested in my own body. This is also the moment when the form of the work becomes complete. At first, all I do is to poke roughly at the material, and try to bend it, sometimes violently: it doesn’t always bend to my will, so to speak. (Imagination and expectation travel on a trajectory parallel to reality.) Then, all at once, a form that cleaves perfectly to my own space emerges, and my body senses a pushing back similar to what I feel with my paintings and drawings. As soon as I meet this resistance, the material and the space it occupies that used to be soft and supple seems to congeal and harden, and I am no longer able to intervene.

It is almost as if the work has now forsaken me: there is now a membrane-like barrier in between us. I remove my hands, and step back, so that this membrane can remain tense and inflated — and so that I may continue to feel the work pushing back against me.

Public Collection

Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art

Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company

Ryutaro Takahashi Collection

Monex, Inc.

Official website

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