Miwa Ogasawara

The painter Miwa Ogasawara’s pictures are of everyday, unspectacular motifs, which, despite their reserved colouring, seem to be filled with light. The interplay between light and dark belongs to the tradition of Japanese shadow aesthetics, but also distances itself from these with great poise. “A person with no shadow has no soul”, says Ogasawara. “In my case, the search for clarity always ends in the diffuse zone of ambivalence.” This ambivalence occurs because the boundaries between truth and reality appear blurred in the pictures. However, in the decisive moment before the fundamental aesthetics and the geometric proportion of the motifs become too perfect, the artist lays down her tools: “the perfect world is unreal and artificial”, says Ogasawara, “truth is never complete, never perfect”.