Minami Kobayashi: Paintings 2016-24

Minami Kobayashi’s The Song of Jujubes showcases surreal paintings exploring memory, nostalgia, and belonging.

Minami Kobayashi (b.1989) is a Japanese artist based in London. Covering a significant period of development in her practice as a painter, this publication coincides with her second major solo exhibition, The Song of Jujubes, at Frestonian Gallery, London.

Kobayashi’s paintings depict familiar yet surreal scenes, created from an amalgamation of memories, places, and ordinary people. In her dream-like ambiguous narratives, nature, animals, and humans are given equal status; her realms are symbiotic societies with multiple creatures. She captures transitory and fluctuating moments, depicting her protagonists in states of flux, vulnerability, and openness. Rendered in a post-Impressionist palette, her compositions are a potent mix of playfulness and deeper themes of human and natural life.

Bringing together eleven new canvases, The Song of Jujubes takes its title from a song that the artist used to sing as a teenager in her hometown of Nagoya, Japan. It begins with a girl eating one jujube fruit every night, wondering what she will do when they are all gone. Imbued with a sense of nostalgia and loss, the works consider what ＂home＂ means and the strong relationship between people and place.

This publication documents Kobayashi’s paintings chronologically, from her early works of 2016 to 2024. In a foreword, the Directors of Frestonian Gallery, Matt Incledon and Rollo Campbell introduce the inner world of the artist and the themes of The Song of Jujubes. In an interview with Lisa Wainwright, Kobayashi discusses her time studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her unique painting technique, and the symbolism in her scenes. She also expands upon her artistic influences, including Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the tenets of Buddhism, Tarot, and the Nabi painters, such as Félix Vallotton, Édouard Vuillard, and Pierre Bonnard. In her essay ＂Temperature of a Memory＂, Laura Allsop analyzes Kobayashi’s recent paintings in relation to memory and place, particularly the artist’s hometown of Nagoya.

Edited by Incledon and designed by Joe Gilmore, the book is co-published by Frestonian Gallery and Anomie Publishing, London.

Minami Kobayashi (b.1989, Nagoya, Japan) lives and works in London. She holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and a BA in Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts (2016). Kobayashi makes figurative paintings that combine intimacy and mystery through their depictions of ordinary people, animals, and places, that seem vaguely surreal and ever so slightly off-kilter.

Recent solo or duo exhibitions include I Spell a Word to Free You (with Adrianne Rubinstein) at Et Al Gallery, San Francisco (2024), Place and Presence (with Patrick Procktor) at Frestonian Gallery (2023), and Somewhere not here at Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago (2022).