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Mami Kosemura
Born 1975 in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Kosemura is a Japanese Contemporary artist. She received her D.A. in Oil Painting from the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. She participated in exhibitions such as “East of Eden” at the Freer Gallery of Art & Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Smithsonian, Washington D.C. in 2007. In 2018, she held a solo exhibition “Mami Kosemura: Phantasies Over Time” at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

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Pursuing the Background of a Realistic Painting through Interval Photography
The innovative “Moving Still-life”

Mami Kosemura builds a precise set and shoots it at interval photography for several months, and then connects the thousands of photographs to create a stop-motion animation that could be called a "Moving Still-life". Her main motifs are classical European portraits, realistic still-lifes by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Francisco de Zurbarán and others from the 16th and 17th centuries, and still-lifes with mundane pots and bottles reminiscent of the 19th and 20th century painter Giorgio Morandi. In her work, she explores the subtleties of composition and editing in order to bring the three-dimensional reality captured by the camera as close as possible to the two-dimensional painterly realism. If you gaze at her work in silence, you will encounter a moment when reality, compressed in the fiction of photography, seems to thaw out and become softly scented.

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Objects - New York - (2016)

A series of photographs created during her 2016-17 residency in New York City. Using trash and junk she found by chance on the street and in thrift stores, she completed this "still-life" following the composition of a study by the Spanish painter Zurbaran. The elusive objects are carefully observed and transformed into realistically illusory pictures. The elusive objects are carefully observed and transformed into realistically illusory pictures.

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Banquet (2018)

The solo exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in 2018 was the first time that the process of creating this and other works was shown to the public. Remnants of objects, including decaying flowers and fruits used in the filming process, were displayed as installations. The exhibition revealed mysteries that had previously been invisible to viewers, and at the same time led us to become aware of the vestiges of "life" that must have quietly floated around the site of her production.

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Drape IV (2014)

By covering the objects on the table with a thin cloth, she gives them all an identical texture. This accentuates the impression of silence, which is reminiscent of "the mansion before I moved" or "an empty villa in a summer resort". Life is removed from the still life and an image of death appears. At the same time, there is a sense of serenity in the picture, as if I were taking a nap, which fascinates me.