Mika Horibuchi uses trompe l’oeil to translate delicate and involved works on paper into oil. Showcasing both a depth of skill and conceptual rigor, she elaborates on ideas about the reproduction of images. The precise mining of themes existential to painting as a whole is concealed within the simplicity of translated drawings. These drawings, re-interpreted into painting reflect on Western Art Historical priorities, a hierarchy that has had particular impact on Japanese artmaking since the Meiji Period.

“There’s a blunt and transparent approach to it all,” the artist says. “My intention is to put artifice onto the surface. To reveal the deception. To create space for new meaning.” The one-to-one reproduction of the initial image wills the viewer towards a type of magical thinking, at once acknowledging and shortening the distance of the two parts, thereby enacting in double the suspension of disbelief present in all painting. Horibuchi pulls back the curtain, convincing the viewer at once that the work is both paint on paper and a conduit for something greater.

For Frieze, Horibuchi will transform the art fair booth into a fictional institution's corridor, where the admissions exams for an arts school are posted. Encased in an industrial, metal, and locked notice board are many versions of drawings of an apple. The image repeats with difference: in style, medium and scale, connoting varying authorship. Horibuchi methodically and precisely renders some of the “drawings” in oil on linen.

The subject is an apple, intentionally rendered in portrait orientation as opposed to the landscape orientation that is typical of still-life. Imbuing her installations with narrative and humor, Horibuchi suggests that this orientation criteria was installed as a “trick for the students”. The implication is that the drawings of admitted students are encased in the vitrine: those who expertly balanced compliance, rigor and the right amount of individualistic flourish in their rendering of the apple.

Horibuchi's paintings rely on modes of thought that surround status in western contemporary art and the histories that have produced these styles of thinking. She engages rigorously with the ways in which perception is altered based on context, producing a playful spiral of dishonesty.

Mika Horibuchi is a stalwart of the arts community in Chicago. She graduated from the Arts Institute in 2013, and has held solo exhibitions at Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and at the Driehaus Museum in Chicago. Her work has been the subject of three solo exhibitions at Patron Gallery, and she is the founder and co-director of 4th Ward Project Space, an exhibition space active in Chicago since 2014. In New York, she has held solo exhibitions at Bortolami and 56 HENRY. Horibuchi was selected as one of Cultured Magazine’s Young Artists to Watch, 2024.