Yumiko Yoneda
With Dialogue I, Francis Maere Fine Arts launches a new exhibition series in which contemporary artists enter into dialogue with a curated selection of historical masters from the gallery’s collection. By bringing together works from different periods, the series explores how artistic ideas, forms, and sensibilities continue to resonate across time.
The first edition features Yumiko Yoneda, a Japanese artist who lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands. After studying sculpture at Shimane University, she continued her artistic development at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where she settled in Europe and began building her international practice.
Yoneda is known for her quiet, contemplative sculptures, characterized by soft, rounded forms and a restrained palette of white and grey. Built around lightweight polystyrene cores and finished with plaster and modelling paste, each sculpture is carefully shaped by hand, resulting in surfaces that feel both organic and precise.
The sphere and circle lie at the heart of her work. These universal forms evoke ideas of continuity, balance, and the cyclical nature of life. Through subtle variations of this language of form, Yoneda creates sculptures that radiate calm and invite silence and contemplation.
In Dialogue I, her contemporary works are presented alongside selected historical pieces, creating a visual exchange that highlights how fundamental artistic concerns such as form, space, and presence transcend generations.
