Moemi Yamamoto

Moemi Yamamoto (born 1985, Sapporo) is a Japanese painter living and working in Prague. She studied at the Tohoku University of Art and Design in Japan, where she continued to focus on painting in the following years.

In 2018, she decided to move to Europe. She chose Prague due to her love for the work of Franz Kafka and stayed. She learned Czech and, in 2022, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague, in Josef Bolf's studio.

Her diploma thesis received immediate acclaim: critics hailed her as one of the greatest talents of her graduating class, and the Czech Academy of Visual Arts awarded her the Discovery of the Year prize. At her first solo exhibition, *Yume* (Japanese for "Dreams"), nearly all the exhibited paintings were sold.

Yamamoto paints her dreams. She combines Japanese parallel perspective, in which parallel lines never converge, with the flatness of Czech Gothic painting. These are two traditions that originated at opposite ends of the world, yet they treat space with a similar sense of freedom. She paints using the classical Renaissance technique of egg tempera with oil. The result is scenes out of time: figures walking from nowhere to nowhere, rooms opening into twilight landscapes, and staircases and windows that defy the laws of physics. Critics compare her work to both Kafka and Švankmajer, and it is recognizable at first glance.

She has held solo exhibitions in Prague, Bratislava, and at the Gallery of Fine Arts in Cheb, and her work has also been presented at an art fair in Taipei.