Michiko Horie "Anonymous girls no.1"

Michiko Horie "Anonymous girls no.1" 2026

Painting, Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 28.62 x 23.86 inches
Unique
Signed on Verso

Michiko Horie is a Tokyo-based artist with cultural roots in both France and Japan. She spent many years in France, where she studied art in Paris. Her early practice included acrylic painting and embroidery-based installations, with her work exhibited in Paris, New York, and London. Alongside her own practice, Horie has worked closely with artists and contributed to the production and organization of exhibitions, maintaining a longstanding connection to the contemporary art world.

After returning to Japan in 2022, Horie resumed her painting practice with a renewed focus on oil. Her recent work explores the boundaries between the human body and matter, reality and dreams, and memory and imagination.

Artist Statement

"The figures that appear in my recent paintings have surfaces resembling porcelain or metal and reveal very little emotion or individuality. Rather than portraits of specific people, I see them as shell-like beings that have temporarily taken human form.

What, then, is the body? Is it a vessel that contains something without fixed form, or merely a temporary container in which consciousness and memory reside? We appear to be separated from the outside world by our skin. Yet every act of touching, seeing, and feeling continuously unsettles the boundary between inside and outside. The bodies that appear in my paintings exist somewhere within these questions.

Porcelain is a material made from clay and minerals. By giving the human body such a material quality, I return it to the realm of matter that makes up the natural world. In this sense, human beings are no longer exceptional, but simply one form within a continuous material world, alongside plants and minerals. Painting itself is also composed of materials derived from the earth. The process of combining these materials and transforming them into an image has always reminded me of alchemy.

At the same time, fragments of dreams, films, books, social media, memories, and the countless images we encounter every day accumulate within us. As they intermingle, they gradually lose their original sources and re-emerge in different forms.

Through this process, distinctions between human and matter, reality and dreams, individuality and anonymity begin to dissolve. The figures in my paintings inhabit this uncertain territory. They are not fixed beings, but images in the midst of transformation—human yet object-like, seemingly real yet dreamlike, familiar yet somehow anonymous. For me, painting is a way of observing these uncertain states of existence." - Michiko Horie