Kim Uchiyama: Atrium
My paintings emerge from a sustained contemplation of Italian Renaissance compositions, Pompeiian frescoes, and the enduring presence of Greek and Roman architecture. Recently, I’ve devoted significant time to visiting and closely studying the vast temple sites scattered across Sicily and southern Italy—ancient spaces that continue to shape my visual vocabulary. In response to these encounters, I construct paintings that translate the sensual resonance of these places into the language of modernist abstraction. Drawing on the formal components of ancient architectural orders, I build new visual ‘constructions’—structured yet open, rooted in the geometry of the grid. Within this framework, space is not rendered through illusion, but a construct revealed through flatness and rhythm. It is color—its relationships, tensions, and juxtapositions—that breathes life into these works. As Hans Hofmann observed, “In nature, light creates color; in the picture, color creates light.” That transformation—light created by color adjacency—is at the heart of my endeavor.
KIM UCHIYAMA – BIO
Kim Uchiyama is a painter based in New York City, originally from Des Moines, Iowa. Over the past forty years, she has presented over twenty solo exhibitions, including recent shows at Kaliner Gallery, Helm Contemporary, The Lobby Gallery at 499 Park Avenue in New York, Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, New York, and Spazio Contemporaneo Agora’, Palermo, IT.
Uchiyama works primarily in oil on raw linen, using color as a source of light. Through subtle shifts in hue, scale, and material, her paintings explore the resonance between form and feeling. Influenced by ancient architecture and the measured clarity of classical structures, she reimagines these timeless geometries through the lens of contemporary abstraction.
Her work has been featured in numerous museum and university exhibitions, recently at the University of Alabama, Drake University, Louisiana State University Museum of Art, and the University of Tennessee. Her paintings are part of several notable collections, including the Delaware Art Museum, the Princeton University Art Museum, the University of Alabama and the University of Tennessee.
Her work has been written about in The New York Times, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Hopkins Review, Artcritical.com, Hyperallergic, and Two Coats of Paint. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a two-time MacDowell Fellow, current Artist-in-Residence at Art Cake, Brooklyn, an upcoming resident at PS122, New York City, and President of American Abstract Artists.