William Hine is pleased to present Distant Thunder, a solo exhibition by the Düsseldorf-based artist Tadashi Toyama, on view from 7 March to 5 April, 2025. The exhibition will be Toyama’s debut solo presentation in the UK, offering a survey of the last two years of his practice, bringing together a body of work spanning 2023-2025. 

For Toyama, painting is a means to access and explore sensations that language alone cannot fully convey. It is a way of tapping into the depths of consciousness by attempting to translate subjective experiences into visual forms, allowing for intuition and spontaneity to guide his process. At the root of his practice is an existential curiosity abut the nature of reality and a desire for liberation and understanding; an attempt to wrangle with societal alienation through a cathartic process of image-making. Based on his own life, travel and research, the paintings bring to bear a diverse set of influences and experiences, drawing fluidly upon motifs from classical Noh theatre and Japanese folklore alongside artistic and philosophical movements of European modernism. The result is a form of expressionism that embraces a non-linear sense of time and unconventional use of perspective and space in the creation of liminal, transitory realms, populated by figures, buildings and landscapes that are both familiar and otherworldly. 

Toyama draws upon individual memories and the collective unconscious in order to explore human existence through aspects of ritual behaviour. Across his paintings are figures suspended in abstracted dreamworlds, engaged in narratives that defy clear logic. Instead they conjure feelings of unease, contemplation and a sense of wonder. The figures become stand-in’s for personal and universal experiences of comfort and discomfort, belonging and estrangement, and communion with nature.  Despite a sense of foreboding in some of the imagery, there is an optimism that underpins Toyama’s work, striving for a form of hope and transformation.