ROOM 09　Maria Farrar

Maria Farrar was born in the Philippines in 1988 to a British father and a Filipina mother. After spending her childhood in Japan, she moved to London when she was fifteen years old, and continues her creative work there today.
Her major solo exhibitions include Spring (Ota Fine Arts, Shanghai, 2020) and Too late to turn back now (Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore, 2019). Her major group exhibitions include Known Unknowns (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2018).
In Farrar’s paintings, a distinctively vivid colour palette and motifs hint at a Western atmosphere, but the influence of her experiences in Japan and the sensibilities cultivated in her there seem to show in her brushwork, which draws on techniques from oriental calligraphy such as kasure (dry strokes) and nijimi (bleeding), as well as manga-like compositions and bold outlines. The four paintings presented here were drawn exclusively for Shiroiya Hotel.
Since the concept of the hotel is to “revitalise the city”, Farrar proposed a colourful display window series “to avoid intimidating visitors with elegant minimalism”. Scenes of shop windows with shoes, wine bottles, and bread remind the viewer of the excitement of shopping and the excitement of heightened desire for worldly things.
“Shop windows divide possessing an item from simply gazing at it,” says Farrar. “This represents the universal feeling of wanting to possess something and relates to the unique possibilities hidden within art.”
In this way, to gaze at the works in this room is to feel the distance that the act of purely enjoying beautiful things exists has from such desires.

It is not necessary to take the painting home to enjoy it. Even if you don’t possess the actual work, something important will remain inside you. If people receive even a little positivity from my work and bring vibrancy to Maebashi, that will make my work valuable. —Maria Farrar