Mitsuko Miwa
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Works from Rendition at Longhouse Projects.
“Rendition focuses on multiplicity within the medium of painting. In one body of work, Miwa offers seemingly typical “abstract paintings”—bands of color that are derived from stacks of nameless books, providing a pictorial dilemma, in which the viewer is asked to read but cannot. In another body of work, she produces partially abstracted images, repetitive depictions of several forms of a still-life in flux—a molded piece of clay, which slowly proves to be a boisterous revamping of rendering, revealing slight and shifting discoveries in every new composition. In a third body of work, she accumulates quick strokes of Prussian Blue oil paint to make pared down, monochromatic, illustrative pictures of wine glasses—banal portraits of a simple vessel for the most cheerful or somber of times, a symbolic duality gleaned from an unexpected icon.
Dualities are integral to the overarching scope of Miwa’s practice. She is both faithful to and skeptical of the medium of painting, yet her paintings evidence her giving in to the medium time and time again. Despite her initial plans for each body of work, she allows the paintings to speak for themselves, claiming to refute a specific “style,” much in the tradition of Kippenberger, Polke, Richter, etc. Similar to her refusal of any sort of subscription to style, she also refuses to be didactic; instead, she uses the diversity of depictions and endless referents to humbly hand her paintings over to the viewer to piece together.” – Longhouse Prohjects