GALLERY crossing is pleased to present nivas, a two-person exhibition by Portugal-based visual artist Filipa Tojal and Tokyo-based printmaker Natsumi Kobayashi, on view from July 18 to August 2.

Born in Portugal in 1993, Tojal studied Fine Arts at the University of Porto before spending four years in Japan, where she earned her master’s degree from Tokyo University of the Arts. Now based in Portugal, she works primarily in painting. Through close observation of nature and landscape, and through a contemplative engagement with them, Tojal explores the intersections of memory and present experience, intention and chance, treating these within the material and temporal dimensions of painting. Rather than representing landscape itself, her paintings evoke its atmosphere, sensations, and traces of memory, inviting viewers into a quiet awareness of shifting time and of our relationship to place. Deepening her inquiry into materials by layering Western and Eastern media and techniques, Tojal has, in recent years, also expanded beyond the conventional framework of painting, creating installations that emphasize the relationship between the work and the surrounding space through the collection of objects and architectural elements.

Born in 1986 and based in Tokyo, Natsumi Kobayashi creates prints using lithography-based plate-making techniques. She studied design at Musashino Art University and previously worked in landscape design. Applying printmaking methods she taught herself, Kobayashi brings together distant landscapes and the near views of her everyday life, layering perspectives that move between distance and proximity, interior and exterior, within a single pictorial plane. In doing so, she renders not so much the object seen as the very act of looking itself. “I have especially come to think of my own garden as a kind of mirror that brings the distant close,” Kobayashi has said. For her, the water basin placed in the garden reflects lakes held in distant memory; at the same time, through the plants that grow there and the animals that gather around it, it becomes a device for drawing a wider world nearer.

Though Tojal and Kobayashi work through different techniques, their paintings share a sensitivity to subtle shifts in tone, layering, displacement, and repetition. In both practices, these formal elements serve to evoke atmosphere, sensation, and traces of memory. The title of the exhibition, nivas, is derived from a word used by Portuguese visitors to Japan in the sixteenth century to refer to Japanese gardens, based on the Japanese word niwa (garden). Far and near, inside and outside, West and East: within the imagined garden that emerges in the space between these terms, the artists’ ways of seeing quietly converge.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the artists will also undertake a short period of on-site production, and the exhibition will include small works created during their stay in Minokamo, where the gallery is located.