Kentaro Okumura

About

Kentaro Okumura (b. 2002) grew up between Japan and China and is now based in London. He graduated from Camberwell College of Arts in 2024. That same year, Okumura was the youngest artist included in On Feeling, a group exhibition curated by Peter Davies at The Approach, and was featured in Nancy Durrant’s article “Meet the most exciting young artists in London right now” for the Evening Standard. In April 2025, Vardaxoglou presented Okumura's first solo exhibition in London. In 2026, Vardaxoglou will present a solo booth at Independent in May and a subsequent solo exhibition at the gallery in October.

Okumura’s paintings are shaped by memory, travel, and lived experience. Rooted in periods spent travelling in Europe, North Africa, Latin America, and Asia, his works translate encounters with specific places into a distilled visual language. He paints what he sees – the people and environments of his daily life – while manipulating uncertainty and underdetermination, often trading clarity of form for clarity of impression. Landscapes become bodily, interiors unfold into coastlines, and recurring motifs surface only to dissolve again.

Working through simplified signs, symbols, forms, and colour, Okumura develops compositions that hover between representation and abstraction. Concrete imagery gives way to gesture, and gesture solidifies into symbol. In this shifting register, paintings function less as depictions than as vessels of translation in which memory, sensation, and place converge. His painting engages a broader historical conversation around the tension between abstraction and figuration, exploring how paint can hold both image and atmosphere in dynamic relation.

Materially, Okumura lays paint in a mesh-like network of marks. The surface is often thick and dry yet retains a sense of lightness, as though the brush has been drawn across the canvas until nearly emptied of pigment. Layers are draped rather than densely overworked, forming a lattice of crisp, fraying lines that gradually cohere into recognisable forms. Through this distinctive handling of paint, Okumura grounds the perpetual shifts of his own subjectivity, proposing painting as a mutable structure capable of simultaneously holding movement, memory, and emotion.