Man of the crowd 三輪美津子 Mitsuko Miwa
Man of the Crowd Mitsuko Miwa
Man of the crowd 三輪美津子 Mitsuko Miwa
Man of the Crowd Mitsuko Miwa

Mitsuko Miwa

The Man of the Crowd

2024

Archival pigment print (matted)

12.7 x 17.5 cm

Edition of 15 copies signed and numbered by the artist, plus 3 artist's proofs and 2 publisher's proofs

Price
€330.00
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The edition

This edition features a photograph of a figure walking through a crowd, wearing a long shirt marked with the title of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd. In this story, the narrator observes an old man with a peculiar expression in the crowd, and decides to follow him through his wanderings in an attempt to understand his character — to no avail. Indeed, the story casts doubt on our ability to perceive and know the world and human beings. Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and other thinkers drew inspiration from it in their study of modern subjectivity.

In this photograph, it is the artist herself who embodies the Man of the Crowd — as the gender-neutral Japanese title allows her to do. She appears as a figure at once indeterminate (her back is to us) and yet distinguished from the mass by the whiteness of her clothing. And so, it is up to us, the viewers, to embody the Narrator, like some voyeur relentlessly contemplating a mysterious and elusive form. However, as the end of the story suggests, the Man of the Crowd may only be a chimera, a mirror image of the Narrator. Could the artist and the spectator also be two sides of the same coin? These themes of the double and the unfathomable appearances resonate magnificently with all Mitsuko Miwa’s work.     

The artist
Mitsuko Miwa 三輪美津子

Mitsuko Miwa was born in 1958 in Nagoya, where she currently lives. 

Since the mid-1980s, Mitsuko Miwa has been developing a multi-faceted body of work that blends the familiar and the uncanny, the identifiable and the unspeakable. While her work includes drawings, sculptures, installations and artist’s books, the medium of painting is at the heart of her practice. Much has been written about the variety of styles that the artist has adopted over the decades, moving each time from one to another with mastery, fluidity, and humor. This apparent derision of the notion of style, combined with the use of pop or everyday imagery, a taste for “simulacra,” and multiple references to art history give her work a manifestly postmodern dimension. But unlike what has often been easily labelled as such, hers is an uncompromising, consistent and fruitful postmodernism. 

The notion of déjà-vu is central to Miwa's work. Through games of repetition and transfer from one medium to another, trompe-l'œil and visual puns, the use of icons and archetypes, the artist places the act of looking in time and history. Vision is intimately linked to the process of reminiscence, to the summoning and deconstructing of things already seen. Seeing is always seeing again, the artist appears to be telling us.

Her work is represented by SCAI The Bathhouse (Tokyo) and Galerie Greta Meert (Brussels).