Ended
Oscar Oiwa
After Midnight
Feb 15 – Mar 17, 2019
Mizuma Kips & Wada Art is pleased to announce the opening of After Midnight, a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Oscar Oiwa supported by the Consulate General of Brazil, NY.
São Paulo-born Oiwa, primarily known for his galactic ink murals, is debuting a new collection of landscape paintings here at Mizuma Kips & Wada Art this February. Brimming with texture, color, and kaleidoscopic patterns, Oiwa’s pieces transport the viewer to an electric wonderland of improbable pictorial space, subverting long-entrenched expectations of surface and surreality in the process. Whether articulating how richly light bathes a forest floor or inviting us to consider the formal fluidity of the cosmos, Oiwa’s practice draws on far-ranging references like Pointillism and graphic design to create a new painterly lexis, a bold, fresh language for worlds at once familiar and bizarre. The larger works seem edgeless in their generosity, ensconcing the viewer in operatic gradients of color. Oiwa’s inspirations feel instinctively Modernist; his ability to harness emotional resonance through expert, immediate brushwork lends the paintings a mystical quality, further nuancing their identities as objects in the white cube. After Midnight offers us a metaphysics of paint, a portal through which we can re-imagine the mundane as utterly miraculous.
Oscar Oiwa was born in São Paulo in 1965 to Japanese immigrants. He received his BFA from the School of Architecture and Urbanism in Sao Paolo in 1989 and has since had over 60 solo exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art, the Takamatsu City Museum, and Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. His work is also featured in a number of international public collections, including the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation, and the University of Sao Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art. He has received several awards, including Pollock- Krasner Foundation grants, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the Asian Cultural Council Grant. Oiwa is currently based in New York City.
