Lia Kimura

Lia Kimura (b. 1992 in Shingu, Japan) is a painter and fashion designer of Polish-Japanese roots. She spent the first seven years of her life in Japan; since 2016 she has lived and worked in Warsaw, where she began her activity as a professional artist. Her work is strongly connected with her place of origin and with the search for her own identity and sense of belonging.

In fluidly succeeding painting series Kimura speaks of longing, loneliness, alienation and transience, balancing between figuration and abstraction. She paints realistic portraits - most often of young women on dark grounds - which she then covers with thick impastos, blurrings and abrasions, making the faces illegible and seeming to dissolve. The expressive layer of paint, applied with the hands (the artist presses the traces of her fingers into the canvas), is for her a manifestation of absence and a desire to preserve mystery.

Despite her young age Kimura has several dozen exhibitions to her name in Poland and abroad - including „Color of Life” at the Saatchi Gallery in London (2021), „Art Now” at the National Museum in Kraków (2018) and a show at the Wallspace Gallery in Warsaw (2022). The leader of the „Compass of Young Art” ranking (2024), she enjoys growing interest from collectors year on year; her works set records on the Polish auction market and are in private collections in Japan, the USA and Germany, among others.