Cupioromantic by Yayoi Deki

Facts

Material

Acrylic on panel

Size

117 x 117 cm

Description

Yayoi Deki creates minimalistic works using the colours from national and minority-group flags. With their gently blurred lines and intermingling tones, these paintings almost appear like flags waving in the breeze. This mottled appearance is achieved through a fingerstamping technique, whereby Deki applies paint onto her fingers and stamps them onto the painting surface. This technique has been consistent throughout her career, since before she attended Kyoto College of Art in the late 1990s.

Deki's subjects, however, have ranged over the years from fantastical imagined landscapes to psychedelic still life tableaux. The minority-group flags series, which includes flags for the Paralympics, animal welfare and LGBTQ+ communities, are at once abstract fields of colour and representations of specific communities. A tiny face is recorded in each finger stamp mark, evoking the individuals that make up the collective, suggesting that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Location