Soji Shimizu
Color Album

Exhibition opening at Stefan Stambolovo 36th Street - 18:00 / 30th August

Play The Changeling by The Doors, pitch it down to 30bpm, and imagine an old photograph of your parents in the back of a Lincoln Versailles, cruising under neon lights, through thick air with gasoline, jasmine, and quiet promises. An omen too bright to ignore a dim bar on Melrose - half empty of longing, fully charged with love.

Soji Shimizu once found an album of photographs in an old rural house where he had lived as a child. The photographs were taken during his parents' 1977 honeymoon trip to Los Angeles. Photographs from a hotel poolside, inside a car, the interior of clothing stores, parks, and other snapshots of everyday life. In capital letters, the photo album had the title Color Album written on it. In 2016, Shimizu selected one of those photographs in that album as inspiration for a painting he exhibited in a group show in Cairo. After the exhibition, the painting was returned to him and left rolled up in a corner of his studio. In 2024, he became a father of a daughter. During short breaks between babysitting, micromanaging his coffee beans, and adjusting the furniture, he took out the painting he no longer liked, stretched it out again, and gradually started adding to it. As time went by, the paintings underwent significant changes. This summer, more than 10 years after he found the photographs, it has been 48 years since they were taken. The paintings now show signs of aging, dragged through the garden, marinated in a restless mirage of LA’s chrome-drenched smog - echoing the artist's journey through time and memory.

Rooted in Shimizu’s explorations of mobility and the specificity of place, the passage of time, and the changes of memory and repetitions, Color Album also gathers recent impressions from his residency at ARV.International in the rural village of Vishovgrad, Bulgaria. There, he turned to a house locally known as the Pink House — a building layered with stories and recollections — as a living thread through his practice. What begins in a house does not stay contained. It moves — across continents, through photographs, onto layers of paint, and into gestures of everyday life. The Pink House emerges not as an endpoint, but as an echo: each house a passage toward another. - Lars Nordby

Soji Shimizu was born in Japan in 1983. Shimizu received a BFA in painting from the University of Tsukuba in Japan. His works have been shown in solo exhibitions at Rathenau Hallen (Berlin, 2021), Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo, 2018), and Setagaya Art Museum (Tokyo, 2015). He lives and works in Berlin.

The exhibition is supported by the Toshiaki Ogasawara Memorial Foundation. Many thanks to Tequila Bar Fnky Mnky for serving free drinks at the vernissage.