4me4you recently had the pleasure of visiting Pontone Gallery, which featured the artist Yuki Aruga.
Yuki Aruga’s work delves into themes of loss, longing, and identity, blending historical influences with contemporary approaches to create a deeply personal narrative.
Drawing inspiration from nature and the 16th-18th century still life tradition, she uses the techniques of the Old Masters to transform digitally rendered collages into evocative, modern paintings.
Her compositions often feature subjects suspended in dark, expansive, void-like spaces, merging the tangible and the intangible. Through a fusion of Western materials and Eastern philosophy, along with elements of Japanese aesthetics, Aruga’s works hover between abstraction and figuration, presence and absence, the real and the virtual.
These contrasts serve as a metaphor for her bicultural identity, exploring the spaces between cultures and the complexity of self within them.
Artist: Yuki Aruga
