HIROYA KURATA: WAITING

Carl Kostyál is delighted to present Waiting, the debut solo exhibition of Hiroya Kurata with the gallery.

July 2 – August 2, 2025

Drawing on memories of domestic life and suburban observation, Hiroya Kurata’s paintings isolate the quiet intensities of the everyday. His figures, often depicted alone, unguarded, in moments of drift or stillness, occupy gently distorted environments.

The works in ‘Waiting’ sit between landscape and vignette, animation and atmosphere. Kurata’s visual language fuses the stylised contours of manga with the compositional calm of landscape painting. Faces are rounded, features reduced to minimal marks—eyes, a mouth, a slight gesture—but the surrounding space is handled with painterly sensitivity. Light takes on an active role: filtered through trees, cast sharply across pavement, or caught in the softness of a carpet at dusk.

In ‘Arcadia’, a young girl sits on a bench in a walled garden. The scene recalls the compositional serenity of Charles Allston Collins’s ‘Convent Thoughts’, 1851, though Kurata’s subject appears more untethered—absorbed in thought rather than devotion. There is no narrative prompt, no action underway. Instead, the weight lies in the posture, the encircling architecture, and the thin edge of stillness that defines the frame.

The exhibition’s title draws attention to this suspended temporality. These are not scenes of waiting in the narrative sense, but images attuned to duration. As Sofia Bertilsson remarks, Kurata offers “intimate glimpses of the artist’s own everyday life, filtered through diametrical aesthetics, manga and landscape painting… These are images of a Paradise that inevitably will be lost, together with the Monsters, in the cracks of adulthood.”