Blum & Poe is happy to present pedra, Los Angeles and New York-dependent artist Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. This exhibition finds Ogawa diving more into her ongoing investigations of the spirituality that pulses although the purely natural planet, the artist’s scientific studies in ikebana, and the foremost religions in Japan. In the performs offered here, Ogawa deploys her signature, childlike figures, depicting them in scenes of silent meditation or rituals centered all over all-natural talismans. Drawing on her knowledge of polytheist and animist procedures in Japan and Brazil—where Ogawa put in her formative years—the artist paints a hyperbolized magical world crammed with spiritual guides and plants with supernatural powers. This altered fact heightens and underscores the cultural overlaps in the artist’s working experience, calling awareness to the hyper-globalized condition of the globe and Ogawa’s encounters with reconciling a number of sociological influences.
Ogawa’s smaller sized paintings established the tone for this exhibition, emphasizing the sizeable interest paid out to earthly types: a red flower cranes in entrance of an olive-toned track record. In her much larger compositions, the artist’s characters have manufactured potions or incenses that they apply to by themselves and others as portion of traditional Brazilian or Japanese customs. By ingesting botanicals or making use of them on their bodies, the gamers in Ogawa’s narrative oeuvre start to merge with the pure world.
The artist’s depiction of procedures involving organic and natural totems foregrounds communion amongst human beings and the earth—a central topic of this exhibition. For Ogawa, some of these rituals are personally witnessed accounts and some are imagined extensions of the cultural phenomena that she encountered residing in Japan and Brazil. As the child of a Brazilian mother increasing up in Japan, Ogawa recalls that her mother would normally pray to angels. While only two p.c of the Japanese populous identifies as Christian, the artist notes getting consolation in observing her mother preserve this practice. In mochi (2023) a determine shrouded in pink raises an supplying of the Japanese rice cake mochi to the heavens.
Additional threading the needle among spiritual tactics in Brazil and traditions in Japan, open up (2023) depicts a shaman and a different determine flanked by bouquets as they pray in opposition to a deep amethyst backdrop. In Japanese worship, it is commonplace to make choices of flowers or food items to the area shrine or the put of prayer in the property. Ogawa paints these floral offerings to nature, identified as kuge, through the exhibition as her possess form of reflective meditation and as a signifies of archiving this devotional apply.
Hinted at by way of backdrops derived from a darkish and shadowy shade palette, this new series gives weighty reflections on a personalized period of time of modify and development for the artist. This changeover, Ogawa notes, was catalyzed by her individual encounters with these depicted rituals and traditions, which provided a further comprehending of human nature and her very own spatial roots.
Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) put in substantially of her childhood in Tokyo, Japan. When she was 3 decades old, Ogawa moved from this vertical urban backdrop to rural Brazil, where she handed a handful of formative early yrs amongst wandering farm animals and hurrying waterfalls. The artist later on relocated to Sweden when she was a teenager, where by she attended significant faculty, and soon thereafter she moved to London to go after her BFA from Central Saint Martins. Soon after obtaining her first solo exhibit at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles, CA in 2017, she had a solo exhibit at Blum & Poe, Tokyo in 2020, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2021, and Blum & Poe, New York in 2022. Her operate is in the assortment of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham NC, and X Museum, Beijing, China. She is now dependent in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY.