Keiko Narahashi

Keiko Narahashi received a BFA from Parsons school of Design (1988), and an MFA in Painting from Bard College (1999). Recent exhibitions include Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery (NYC), Flinn Gallery (Greenwich, CT), Tappeto Volante Projects (Brooklyn), 106 Green, (NYC), Jason McCoy Gallery (NYC), Carvalho Park (Brooklyn), Jack Hanley Gallery (NYC), Underdonk Gallery (Brooklyn), Bennington College Usdan Gallery, and Hofstra University Rosenberg Gallery (NY), among others. She was a recipient of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation studio grant (2005) and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Painting (2006). Her work has been written about in publications such as The New Yorker, Vogue, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times. She was recently featured in New York Studio Conversations, Part II, edited by Stephanie Buhmann (The Green Box, Berlin).

Keiko Narahashi creates clay sculptures that spring from a conviction that forms carry emotional and psychological meaning. These shapes waver between human and nonhuman, figure and landscape, and reflect my particular connection to the natural world. The patterns of my life mirror those of the animals, plants and the moon, and sometimes, it feels like there are no boundaries at all. This sense of wonderment arises out of her interest in old stories, especially Japanese ghost stories, where humans and animals mutate freely.

Although she makes sculptural objects, she often thinks in picture planes like a painter. She builds primarily from clay slabs, drawing cut-lines directly onto the clay so that these drawings themselves become the sculpture. Clay can be both clean or messy; it can be constructed elegantly like architecture, or poked and prodded in sticky lumps. It embodies my contradictory sense of both inhabiting my body and being outside it.

EXHIBITION:
NADA Miami 2025
A Stiller Life, 2021