
JPS Gallery Tokyo is honoured to present “Mubins”, a new solo exhibition by the Brazilian-British artist Natan Heber. Featuring seventeen original oil paintings alongside an immersive video installation, this exhibition marks a thoughtful evolution in Natan Heber’s artistic practice. Following years of exploring various mediums, “Mubins” offers a moment of quiet focus, allowing Natan Heber to embrace a more gestural, primal, and highly intuitive approach to painting. The result is a deeply personal, mature, and conceptually rich body of work that feels entirely new.
The exhibition centres on the “Mubins”, familiar characters that have long populated Natan Heber’s broader artistic universe. Taking its name from a regional dialect in north-eastern Brazil, the word “mubin” describes a small, mischievous, and adorable child. In this series, Natan Heber captures these figures in an intimate state of repose, yawning, tucking in, and surrendering to sleep. This transitional state, where the waking mind begins to drift, becomes a vital condition in which the subconscious processes, reorganises, and generates new ideas. As Natan Heber reflects, “I wanted to put something to rest, and in doing so, allow something greater to wake.”