Juxtapoz Magazine – Asuka Anastacia Ogawa “pedra” @ Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Blum & Poe is delighted to present pedra, Los Angeles and New York-based artist Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. This exhibition finds Ogawa diving even more into her ongoing investigations of the spirituality that pulses even though the purely natural globe, the artist’s research in ikebana, and the foremost religions in Japan. In the works introduced here, Ogawa deploys her signature, childlike figures, depicting them in scenes of tranquil meditation or rituals centered about organic talismans. Drawing on her awareness of polytheist and animist practices in Japan and Brazil—where Ogawa used her formative years—the artist paints a hyperbolized magical planet loaded with religious guides and plants with supernatural powers. This altered fact heightens and underscores the cultural overlaps in the artist’s working experience, calling consideration to the hyper-globalized state of the world and Ogawa’s encounters with reconciling multiple sociological influences.
Ogawa’s more compact paintings set the tone for this exhibition, emphasizing the considerable notice paid to earthly varieties: a pink flower cranes in front of an olive-toned qualifications. In her larger sized compositions, the artist’s people have made potions or incenses that they use to by themselves and some others as component of regular Brazilian or Japanese customs. By ingesting botanicals or utilizing them on their bodies, the players in Ogawa’s narrative oeuvre commence to merge with the all-natural world.
The artist’s depiction of techniques involving organic and natural totems foregrounds communion involving human beings and the earth—a central concept of this exhibition. For Ogawa, some of these rituals are individually witnessed accounts and some are imagined extensions of the cultural phenomena that she encountered residing in Japan and Brazil. As the little one of a Brazilian mom growing up in Japan, Ogawa recalls that her mom would generally pray to angels. Whilst only two percent of the Japanese populous identifies as Christian, the artist notes getting consolation in seeing her mother preserve this follow. In mochi (2023) a figure shrouded in pink raises an featuring of the Japanese rice cake mochi to the heavens.
Even more threading the needle among religious techniques in Brazil and traditions in Japan, open (2023) depicts a shaman and one more determine flanked by bouquets as they pray versus a deep amethyst backdrop. In Japanese worship, it is commonplace to make choices of flowers or food stuff to the area shrine or the position of prayer in the house. Ogawa paints these floral offerings to mother nature, identified as kuge, during the exhibition as her personal variety of reflective meditation and as a suggests of archiving this devotional follow.
Hinted at by backdrops derived from a dim and shadowy colour palette, this new sequence offers weighty reflections on a particular period of time of alter and development for the artist. This transition, Ogawa notes, was catalyzed by her have encounters with these depicted rituals and traditions, which presented a further comprehension of human character and her have spatial roots.
Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) invested a lot of her childhood in Tokyo, Japan. When she was a few yrs outdated, Ogawa moved from this vertical city backdrop to rural Brazil, the place she handed a handful of formative early decades amongst wandering farm animals and rushing waterfalls. The artist afterwards relocated to Sweden when she was a teen, exactly where she attended substantial school, and shortly thereafter she moved to London to pursue her BFA from Central Saint Martins. Soon after possessing her initial solo clearly show at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles, CA in 2017, she experienced a solo show at Blum & Poe, Tokyo in 2020, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2021, and Blum & Poe, New York in 2022. Her get the job done is in the assortment of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke College, Durham NC, and X Museum, Beijing, China. She is at the moment based mostly in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY.
