Oi Sawa
Oil Paintings on Tin and Drawings
May 15- June 2, 2012
Opening reception Thursday, May 17th, 5-7p.m.
Chelsea, NYC: Viridian Artists is extremely proud to present the 12th solo exhibition of Oi Sawa in its new space at 548 W 28th Street. Her exhibition of “Oil Paintings on Tin and Drawings” extends from May 15th to June 2nd, with an opening reception Thursday, May 17th, 5-7p.m.
The noted Japanese artist Oi Sawa has made a unique choice of materials in her artmaking. For years she has created oil painting on tin and drawings on film and paper. Her images too are unique in that they transcend the influences of both Eastern & Western art, focusing on abstract structures in black, grey and silver that utilize architectural imaginings.
One senses an Escher–like vision combined with the influence of cubism in her complex rendering of space that create both a geometry of images as well as a sense of three dimensional structures. Originally inspired by reflections on a stovepipe in her studio decades ago, she uses tin with a signature approach that has intensified and matured over the years. The artist’s limited palette of silvery gunmetal grays has deepened with the spirit of those reflections with the flames of the fires within the stove remembered with touches of reds and golds, adding the sense that nature has not altogether departed.
Oi Sawa’s oil paintings on tin as large 56 inches by 86 inches distinctively evoke towers and orbs floating and swirling in an unknown atmosphere of perhaps the future, perhaps the past. Her tiny collage drawings on film and paper are graphically rendered and the complex images echo structures of dark and futuristic places akin to those in her large paintings.
Until 2007, the artist was a professor at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo in their Department of Scenography, Display and Fashion Design and this year also worked with survivors of the Fukushima nuclear disaster site.
Oi Sawa has won numerous prizes including the Noma Prize in the 27th Annual Ichiyokai Art Exhibition. Her art is included in the collections of the Russell Sage Foundation, Ishikawa Prefectual Museum of Art in Japan, the Manhattan Laboratory Museum and the Nomura Computer System America both in New York, among others. We hope that you will be able to meet this outstanding artist and share her view of life through the vision of her incredibly fascinating artworks.