Kazuki Koga’s colourful paintings are full of soft scenes that you’ll long to be part of

Figures always feature in Kazuki Koga’s paintings – but they’re never looking at their creator. Instead, they’re immersed in their own comings and goings, going about life within the colourful world Kazuki has created: a picnic in the park, a serene trip on a rowboat, gardening, or simply sat, conversing with others. While different in subject, each of Kazuki’s scenes has a serene, peaceful quality about it, creating an acute sense of longing within the viewer for a soft summer day spent with friends.

The reason Kazuki gravitates toward figures is because, in his eyes, they create a sense of narrative. “I think that drawing people can give the scene movement and a sense of story,” he says. Such focus makes sense when learning his influences, most recently the similarly figurative painter Yumeji Takehisa, who also practiced as a poet alongside his painting. In practice, Kazuki focuses primarily on “vivid shapes and colours”, and mainly works with oil and acrylic paint, but he sometimes dabbles in lithography and Risograph too. And rather than working from photographs, Kazuki dedicates himself to working from his memory and imagination, a process that he says helps him to work more “freely”.

Born in Tokyo, Kazuki studied printmaking at a university in Tokyo before moving to Leipzig in 2019 to study painting and printmaking at the University of Leipzig. It was here that Kazuki experienced one of the most formative experiences of his painting journey, working under the fellow artist Christoph Ruckhäberle, a figure who is still a “great influence” on Kazuki’s work. “From him I learned the basics of how to make a painting more interesting through colour, light and shade, composition,” says Kazuki. It’s true that these components – particularly Kazuki’s deft use of light – give his works their atmosphere. A small snapshot in time of a beautiful moment – one that’s hard not to have lingering in your mind’s eye, and one that Kazuki puts on a canvas.