Keita Morimoto

Keita Morimoto was born January 8, 1990, in Sakai City, Osaka, Japan. He moved to Canada in 2006, earned his BFA from OCAD University in Toronto in 2012, and returned to Japan in 2021, and now lives and works in Tokyo. His work has been shown at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, K11 Musea, the Powerlong Art Museum, the Art Gallery of Peterborough, The Power Plant, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

Morimoto paints the city after dark — isolated figures, convenience stores and vending machines caught in pools of artificial light, assembled from memory after long night walks through Tokyo. His approach draws on the dramatic lighting of the Baroque masters, treating a streetlamp or a glowing shopfront window not simply as a physical detail but as something closer to a spiritual event — a modern echo of the candlelight in Caravaggio or Georges de la Tour. In his recent charcoal drawings, made after a decade away from the medium, he strips his scenes back to their essential structure, searching for the world in the instant just before it resolves into a recognizable image.