Nozomi Tojinbara's work explores the transformative power of storytelling and the way narrative reshapes our perception of reality. Drawing inspiration from the dramatic light and theatrical compositions of Baroque painting, the artist creates immersive pictorial worlds inhabited by fragile young protagonists suspended between myth, history, and contemporary visual culture.
In Tojinbara's paintings, references to classical art, personal experience, and the visual language of video games coexist within carefully constructed scenes that transcend time and geography. These layered narratives resist a singular interpretation, instead inviting viewers to inhabit moments of ambiguity where multiple stories unfold simultaneously. The tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar becomes a space for reflection, encouraging audiences to question the boundaries between fiction and lived experience.
Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, Tojinbara conceives painting as an encounter—an event in which the viewer moves fluidly between reality and imagination, self and other. Through an evocative use of light, symbolism, and theatrical staging, each work becomes an open invitation for personal interpretation, allowing untold stories to emerge through the viewer's own memories and emotions.
Dorothy Circus Gallery Rome is pleased to present In Shadows, Seeking You, Nozomi Tojinbara's upcoming solo exhibition, opening on 21 November 2026. Bringing together a new body of work, the exhibition unfolds within the shifting space between light and shadow, presence and absence, the visible and the imagined. Continuing Tojinbara's exploration of narrative as a space of transformation, In Shadows, Seeking You invites viewers to search within these suspended worlds, where historical aesthetics and contemporary visual culture converge and where meaning is revealed gradually, through what is seen, concealed, remembered, and imagined.
