Mariana Oushiro

Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce Supernova, its first solo exhibition with Brazilian-born, New York-based Mariana Oushiro– the artist’s first in the city she now calls home.

Together, the show’s large-scale paintings and works on paper confront viewers with explosive, wild compositions; torqued lines and swirling geometries reverberate with allusions to cosmological energies and universal forces. Articulated with lyricism and vigor, Oushiro’s practice is driven by an impulse to interpret immense sensory experiences that result from her observation of the world around her. 

From March 26 through May 07, 2022, Supernova will be on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery’s 19th Street space in Chelsea. 

Mariana Oushiro’s pictorial language is rooted in the choreography of movement and shaped by the artist’s ability to remain exquisitely in tune with her own subconscious. Her gestural marks are powerful but intimate, with the flow of each stroke revealing a simultaneously cerebral and intuitive approach to line, color, and composition. At the same time, her works exhibit a distinctively raw materiality, a tactile effect that derives from the physical act of making. 

Oushiro paints on a grand scale. Laying unstretched cotton canvases flat on the studio floor, she moves around the plane and engages with the surface of the work. Tracking her feet across the canvas, kneeling within the composition or stretching her body across it, she creates sweeping curves, sharp parallel lines and rhythmic spatial planes in charcoal, pastels, pigments and oil. She often uses her hands to move the medium within the composition, leaving ashen, coal-colored cinders of charcoal dust in soft smudges and smeared imprints on the picture ground.

Oushiro draws inspiration from elements of the natural world and her belief in a higher natural order. In conjuring her paintings, she draws upon her impressions of the topographies of agricultural landscapes in Brazil, the sensation of buoyancy in water, sacred geometries, architecture, and science. Her families’ heritage, originating in Japan and Brazil, informs her philosophical and aesthetic frameworks, and has shaped the development of her artistic language as an idiom of abstraction– an expression of experience that is beyond translation – that possesses the potential to unite and unify. Her circles, curves, and lines are the foundational crux of compositions through which she seeks radical freedom in communication. These visual elements are not static forms but rather kinetic elements that float, pivot, lurch, whirl, and surge through spatial encounters, conveying states of mind and of perception that are at once highly specific and entirely ineffable. 

The exhibition takes its name from the painting titled Supernova (2021), a monumental canvas that alludes to the radiant shock wave emanating from the annihilation of one of the universe’s most massive stars. That rare astronomical occurrence captures the luminous force and transient evolution of stellar life, transcending time and distance as an event that happened millions of years ago. Subtly tinged with burnt umber that suggests the afterglow of such a cosmic event, the canvas is striking in its evocation of both perceptual and emotional phenomena. A surging torrent of pigment on canvas, Oushiro’s Revolutions per minute (2022) is a tour de force of painterly gesture that imitates the burning speed of a shooting star. Built in dense layers in a cool, near-monochromatic palette of black, white, and icy blues, this painting suggests that the artist might be an inheritor of the Abstract Expressionists. In her paintings on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery, including Singularity (2022) and Speaking of a spirit on fire (2022), hard edged lines bisect compositional geometries and shifting spheres of color that suggest the origins of form as a universal language. 

About the Artist 
Mariana Oushiro was born in 1992 in São Gotardo, Minas Gerais, Brazil. She received her B.F.A at Faculdade Santa Marcelina in São Paulo, Brazil before moving to New York to attend the Art Students League of New York. In New York she worked as a studio assistant to Ronnie Landfield and studied under Pat Lipsky and Jill Nathanson. Supernova at Vito Schnabel Gallery will be her first solo exhibition.