​​Peder Lund is pleased to present an exhibition with the eminent Japanese artist Rei Naito (b. 1961, Hiroshima). Renowned for her delicate installations, sculptures, and works on paper that explore the incomprehensible fact of life itself, Naito invites visitors into an atmosphere of quiet reflection on breath, spirit, and our shared existence. At the heart of her practice lies the enduring question: "Is simply existing on this earth a blessing in itself?"

This is the first solo exhibition of the artist's work in Scandinavia.

To encounter a work by Rei Naito is to enter a space of heightened awareness — of one's own body, one's breath, and of life itself as a fleeting yet shared condition. Over the past forty years, Naito has devoted her practice to what she has described as "the incomprehensible fact that we are alive in this world." Her works do not impose meaning so much as they stage conditions in which meaning arises — ephemeral, delicate, and deeply intimate.

Central to Naito's art is the concept of breath. For Naito, breath is at once invisible and palpable, a paradoxical force that affirms life precisely because it cannot be contained or possessed. In the sculptural installation tama/anima (please breathe life into me) (2025), a narrow gutter of water shimmers with subtle movement. The work unites two linguistic roots: tama, the Japanese word for spirit or soul, and anima, the Latin root for breath. The piece quietly insists that to live is to participate in this exchange of air and water, of spirit and body. It epitomizes her conviction that art, at its most essential, is a vessel for the life force that cannot be owned but only experienced.

Her commitment to this elemental aesthetic was seen in her 2023 exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, where tama/anima appeared in dialogue with color beginning. The series color beginning originated in 2021 as a pair of paper works exhibited at MtK Contemporary Art in Kyoto. In 2024, at the Tokyo National Museum, Naito introduced the expanded title color beginning/breath with the addition of "breath." These exhibitions deepened a process that now culminates in Oslo, where paintings and sculptural works form a single, sustained inhalation and exhalation across space.

If tama/anima embodies the vital currents of water and spirit, Naito's works on paper register breath in another register. The series developed out of a daily practice of attuning to light and atmosphere. For Naito, each work is not an image but a lived exhalation, a veil of color that makes palpable the moment of its own making. Positioning herself at a point removed from form, Naito explores moments when mind, hands, fingers, paper, paint, water, and brush become one. Her painting media shift and go through cycles; Naito employs brushes, spoons, paper, canvas, flannel, paint tubes, tissue, and even branches, awakening physical and mental instincts that transcend human will. Many of the works exhibited at Peder Lund were painted using branches; the final piece was completed with a branch gathered in Oslo. This method liberates her and the countless lives dwelling in the unconscious, guiding her toward the essence of human nature.

During preparations for her recent exhibitions, Naito began to perceive the white surfaces of her paintings as "matrix" spaces — living grounds where color reveals air and light within, generating phenomena akin to her spatial works. The presentation at Peder Lund extends this understanding: paintings and sculptural works intertwine, exploring the indivisibility of life and death. The works reveal a world in which everything — objects, people, animals, plants, air, light, the departed and the unborn — interweaves inseparably with our own breath.

Read more