The Man of the Crowd

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).