Tokyo

Danshaku Miyazawa in mid air

2010/3/20–4/17

opening reception
3.20(sat) | 17:00 - 19:00
at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP | Tokyo

Tokyo Gallery + BTAP proudly present Miyazawa Danshaku's solo exhibition, "In Mid Air." Miyazawa is a new rising artist who has exhibited in Tokyo Wonder Site's group exhibition in 2004, "Wonder Wall." In 2008, soon after Miyazawa held a joint exhibition with Nozomi Kobayashi in "comings and goings," he exhibited numerous works in foreign art fairs. For his first solo exhibition, Miyazawa plans to exhibit his recent years' series of drawings.

The heritage of Western art previously succeeded from the categorization of portraitures, landscape paintings and still-life paintings, is now invalidated by the rise of abstract art in the 20th century. The appearance of abstract art allows the contemporary world to expand just like the expansion of the market with the abstraction in the idea of currency. The domination of abstract art in the market is the presupposition of the rise of abstract figurative paintings in modern Japan.

If we say that contemporary portraiture is an expression of an individual, then what is the meaning of portraitures in the modern market where every single individual is being reciprocated? No matter how concrete the figures are painted, the market will reduce it to abstract values. Therefore, many Japanese abstract figurative artworks being proposed to the art market, sometimes as a parody or as a comment on naive sensibility, are located far from the category of portraiture.

Miyazawa Danshaku is an artist with no previous artistic education, thus allowing him to be separated completely from the market described above. He composed his human figures with innumerable forms of circles and dots, using of lead pencil and watercolors in his drawing works. His delicate and ultrafine brushstrokes change into concrete figures on screen. And it is these brief changes conceived on paper in which the place the contemporary people's diluted "individuality," caused by the expanding market, exists.

Critique : Tsunehiro Uno "From the external world to the environment: childishness and 'particular' degeneration"

Danshaku Miyazawa

Danshaku Miyazawa’s work was selected for inclusion in the “Tokyo Wonder Wall 2004” open call exhibition organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 2004. He has held both a two-person exhibition together with Nozomi Kobayashi (2008) as well as a one-man show (2010) at Tokyo Gallery + BTAP (Tokyo), in addition to participating in numerous art fairs. Miyazawa uses countless fine lines and circles with a pencil, as well as blots of water-color to depict human figures with ambiguous, undefined forms. These images are not fixed to the pictorial surface, giving viewers the impression of constant flux and movement – just like the respiratory “comings and goings” of living beings. Miyazawa’s paintings are metaphors for the fickle, transient and uncertain moods of the contemporary human condition.

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