Kogachi’s paintings render domestic scenes in monumental scale. Awkward and humourous, they capture a rivalrous, sometimes tense, relationship between mother and child. Here, a kitchen, dining room, living room or bedroom become an arenas for conflict. Kogachi invites the viewer to become a kind of referee, to arbitrate who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s just and unjust, where power lies, or simply to derive a morbid pleasure in witnessing private disputes unfold in public.

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For MOM, ARE WE FRIENDS?, Kogachi has painted directly onto the walls of MEANWHILE, inserting smaller canvases into the visual space of these scenes—punctuating the space as mise-en-scene. Replacing the bright, dramatic colours of her previous canvas works with a more restricted palette, Kogachi transforms the gallery’s architecture into a stage upon which the ambivalence of familial intimacy is played out in larger-than-life scale.

 

Claudia Kogachi was born in Awaji-Shima, Japan and is based in Auckland. She graduated with a BFA (Hons) from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland in 2017. Recent exhibitions include You’re not a princess, you know, Window, Auckland (2018); Dog Pit, Saatchi & Saatchi & Saatchi, Auckland (2018); Hound Dog, Franklin Arts Centre, Auckland (2018); The Protagonist, Project Space, University of Auckland (2017); Spaces In Between, George Fraser Gallery, University of Auckland (2017); Contact: Foreign and Familiar, The Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii (2016); Under Pressure, The University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawaii (2016).