Miwa Ogasawara’s pale paintings appear light, almost casual, yet they provide firm ground for deep concentration and reflection. In some of her works, the Kyoto-born artist achieves a refreshing effect: painting that delivers abundance through reduction. The artist typically works with everyday, unspectacular motifs—people walking in the park, children playing, scenes in the snow, or even an empty landscape. However, she reshapes these casual themes into a dreamlike, timeless present. In Im Freien (Al Fresco), 2006, people stand under trees; the leaves predominate, dissolving into a blurred, gray green light. Shadowy forms of three people can be perceived, and the whole painting becomes a subtle play between implication and articulation, smoothly executed in the artist’s carefully selected, yet effortless, palette. In the large work Am Nachmittag (In the Afternoon), 2006, a group of children form a circle with their hands. The game seems charmingly innocent; however, the deserted forest in the background suggests something gloomier. Round forms hover like soap bubbles on the lens of a camera, tampering with the painterly perspective. In another work, In Grau (In Gray), 2006, Ogasawara again edges her motif into the realm of the ethereal, and, in the small grotesque masquerade Geschwister (Siblings), 2006, playfulness becomes sinister. Ogasawara’s paintings attempt to make visible an intangible moment, using color as a means to transport a scene and reenergize its memory and emotion.
Translated from the German by Jane Brodie.
