Michael Angel, Eva and I, 2025, Oil on linen, 14 x 11 inch, 35.56 x 27.94 cm
THE HARTZ PROJECT announces its participation in Tokyo Gendai 2026 with Where Traces Remain, a compelling duo presentation featuring artists Michael Angel and Fumiya Odagawa.
Located at Booth H31 within Exhibition Halls C and D at Pacifico Yokohama, the exhibition opens with a VIP Preview on Thursday, September 10, 2026, followed by public days running from Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13.
Bringing together two distinct yet deeply resonant artistic practices, Where Traces Remain operates at the intersection of memory, transience, and the fluid nature of human connection.
Moving away from rigid narratives, both artists construct quiet, contemplative spaces shaped by what is left behind, what is lost, and what softly dissolves over time.
By exploring the physical and emotional landscapes where traces linger long after a moment has passed, Angel and Odagawa establish a poetic, cross-cultural dialogue between absence and presence.
American-Australian artist Michael Angel, born in Melbourne in 1975 and currently based in New York, deconstructs figuration through a profound material intuition driven by accumulation and erasure.
Informed by a multicultural upbringing in the 1980s and 1990s, his work balances gestural abstraction and figuration across painting, works on paper, and mixed media.
Before devoting himself exclusively to fine art, Angel built an influential career in fashion and textile design, running his namesake label in New York from 2007 to 2014 and pioneering early uses of digital textile print.
This background established a foundational relationship between material, surface, and repetition that continues to anchor his painting practice.
Fumiya Odagawa, The Empty Day, 2026, Acrylic on cotton, 53.1 × 41.1 cm
Utilizing heavy palette knife layers and incisive scraping, his stratified, highly tactile surfaces evoke a sense of historical continuity, converting personal narrative and emotional residue into compelling physical noise.
In contrast, Japanese painter Fumiya Odagawa dissolves figuration through atmosphere and silence. Born in Kanagawa in 1996, Odagawa earned his BFA and MFA in Nihonga (Japanese Painting) from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2018 and 2020, respectively.
Drawing from personal experiences and travel, his dreamlike compositions capture quiet, fleeting moments through collage-like layerings of fragmentary impressions.
Grounded in the refined sensibilities of Nihonga and influenced by classic Japanese cinema, his isolated figures and landscapes bleed into hazy, translucent twilight washes.
By blending compositions that emphasize distinctly Japanese rhythms of density, negative space, and interval (ma), Odagawa captures the delicate, melancholic tension of passing time and the fragile nature of interpersonal bonds.
Following international exhibitions in Taipei and winning the Acrylic Prize at the Jackson's Art Prize in 2026, his presentation at Tokyo Gendai reflects his growing global acclaim.
Michael Angel (b.1975, Melbourne, Australia)
Fumiya Odagawa (b,1996, Kanagawa, Japan)
