NEUER GLAUBE
GALERIE SARA LILY PEREZ
24 APRIL - 30 MAY 2026
In Ryo Kato’s paintings, roses bloom through wreckage, light cuts across broken forms, and bodies seem to emerge only to dissolve again. His images do not offer stability. They hold together tenderness and violence, devotion and collapse, urgency and renewal. With Neuer Glaube, Galerie Sara Lily Perez presents a solo exhibition of new works by the Berlin-based Japanese painter, on view from 24 April through 30 May 2026.
Kato’s paintings are built out of collision. Animal forms, bodily fragments, geometric intrusions, smoke, flowers, and radiant shafts of color are forced into unstable relations. Nothing in these works remains purely symbolic or purely descriptive. A rose is never only a rose; light is never simply transcendence; ruin is never just backdrop. Each element is pulled into a volatile pictorial field in which beauty appears under pressure, and meaning remains open, provisional, and intensely alive.
The exhibition’s title, Neuer Glaube “New Faith” points to a form of belief that has survived fracture. Kato’s work does not imagine faith as refuge from the world, but as something tested within it: amid ecological destruction, political exhaustion, spiritual disorientation, and the increasing sense that inherited structures no longer hold. His paintings ask whether conviction, tenderness, or even hope can still appear after collapse, and what form they might take if they do.
Ryo Kato is a Japanese painter born in 1978 in Niimi, Okayama Prefecture, and based in Berlin since 1998. After early studies in drawing and painting in Japan and a brief stay in Paris, he studied at the Berlin University of the Arts under Wolfgang Petrick before becoming a master student of Daniel Richter. His work merges figurative and abstract elements in layered compositions that address environmental destruction, societal change, and the unstable relationship between humanity and nature. Kato has described painting as his primary means of expression, while collage and attached elements enter the work spontaneously during the process.