Bortolami in New York has opened As a Moment and as an Accumulation, a two-person exhibition by Maki Katayama and Hikari Ono, in The Upstairs at 39 Walker Street. The show, organised by the artist Richard Aldrich, runs from 30 October to 19 December 2026.

Katayama, born in Tokyo in 1982, builds her paintings through systematic investigations of colour, measurement and composition, drawing on Sanzo Wada's A Dictionary of Color Combinations, a landmark 1930s publication that brought together traditional Japanese colour sensibilities and Western colour theory. Her work treats colour as a system to be tested, not a mood to be expressed.

Ono, born in Lüneburg, Germany in 1990 and based in Tokyo, works in clay, making an expansive body of sculptures under the collective title Object for Painting. The pieces are conceived as fundamentally tactile paintings, pressing painterly concerns, surface, colour and touch, into three-dimensional form.

The pairing puts two Tokyo-based artists in dialogue around a shared question: how much of painting survives when its usual supports are taken away. Katayama answers with strict systems; Ono answers with objects that behave like paintings but occupy space like sculpture. The gallery's main space at 39 Walker is showing Rebecca Morris at the same time.

Both artists have been active internationally this year. Katayama has shown in Tokyo, including at two meet coffee room, and at LOOP HOLE and XYZ Collective, and her work was included in a Mori Art Museum presentation in 2023. Ono has shown at David Zwirner in New York and GALERIA ALEGRIA in Barcelona in 2026, and at Taka Ishii Gallery in Maebashi in 2025. The Bortolami pairing brings their Tokyo practices to New York together for the first time.