野澤梓｜Azusa Nozawa
Still Fragment

MEDEL GALLERY SHU is pleased to present Still Fragment, a solo exhibition by Azusa Nozawa, on view from February 14 (Sat) through March 1 (Sun).

Azusa Nozawa, a graduate of the Oil Painting Department at Tokyo University of the Arts (BFA, 2019), is one of the leading artists represented by our gallery. She began exhibiting while still in high school and, by the time of her university graduation, had already gained significant recognition as a highly sought-after painter. This exhibition marks her first presentation of new works in approximately two years.

Centered on the theme of “the deconstruction and reconstruction of memory,” the exhibition is structured around the key elements of fragment, blur, and remain. Memory is never preserved in a complete or intact form; rather, it emerges as shards—partial impressions imbued with emotion and attachment—accumulating in layered strata shaped by temporal disjunction and ambiguity.

In Nozawa’s paintings, images do not appear as fixed entities with defined contours or stable meanings. Instead, they surface as fading, overlapping, and partially absent traces. The figures depicted do not point to specific narratives or subjects; they linger on the canvas as presences or afterimages embedded in memory. Within them, one senses both the texture of loss and a quiet attentiveness to what still remains.

Her formal approach—treating line and plane, boundary and void, as equivalent—renders contours unstable and unsettles the very limits of existence. Lines that would ordinarily define boundaries emerge as blank spaces or dissolve into surrounding surfaces, suggesting modes of being released from fixed identities. The background functions not merely as empty space, but as a site where memory settles and time accumulates, forming an atmosphere in which subdued sorrow and faint hope coexist.

The works presented in this exhibition revisit Nozawa’s ongoing use of the “sticker bomb” motif, assembling fragmentary images into layered compositions. Yet this is not a demonstration of technique for its own sake. Rather, the method operates as a structural device to visualize the movement through which memory arises, wavers, and continues to persist. Still Fragment offers a space in which viewers may contemplate what is fading yet undeniably “still here,” and quietly encounter their own memories in the process.